Math Riff: The Cruel Math of Weight Loss Multiplication

Raise your hand if one or more of your new year’s resolutions are “get in shape” or “lose weight” or “By Halloween, look just like Gerard Butler for that Spartan warrior costume I’ve twice now skipped in favor of the Energizer Bunny suit.” What? No?

The sad news from the scale this morning is that I’m 16 pounds away from my resolution goal weight, and while I’m making progress already, it’s slow. I saw a Science Channel program where a guy lost something like 12 pounds in one day. By swimming the English Channel. Still, I can do this.

To get motivated, I decided to do a little math. Mayo Clinic says there are 3500 calories in a pound of body fat, and the elliptical machine is reporting that I’m burning calories at a rate of 800 per hour, so a little unit conversion math would surely tell me I could work this weight off with a couple of days of serious commitment…

16 pounds
1
 ×
3,500 calories
1 pound
 × 
1 hour
800 calories
 =  70 hours

Ouch. These are not the results you were looking for, Obiwan. In fact, my left calf just developed a cramp I think to make darn sure my brain was on the same page with the the muscular/skeletal system’s assessment of these figures.

And, you know, thinking more about it, that Energizer Bunny suit was awfully slimming.

Division with Remainders and Exponent Flash Cards

Adding on to last week’s printable flash cards, you can find links below to additional division flashcards featuring 10, 11 and 12 as divisors, and also flash cards with easy remainders similar to the Division with Remainders worksheets…

Division Flash Cards Divisors 10, 11, 12

Division with Remainders Flash Cards

Additionally, the previous division flash cards have been updated so that the answer hint at the top of each card (the side you’re looking at while you show it to your student) is no longer in the division box format and now (cough) actually shows the quotient.

Also, a quick set of flash cards for common exponents can be found at this link…

Flash Cards for Common Exponents

Have a great week!

 

Quick Tip: Getting Rid of Headers When Printing Worksheets

There’s obviously a whole lot of worksheet printing going on around Dad’s office, not to mention a fair bit of other web-based material going straight from the browser to printed page. By default, your browser will print a timestamp, page numbers, URLs and potentially other stuff in the header or footer of the page. You can disable this, but the instructions vary depending on your browser and OS.

Thankfully, LifeHacker has a nice guide to freeing up a little extra room on the printed page to get some cleaner output…

How Can I Get Rid of the URL and Other Header Text When I Print Web Pages?

Thanks Adam!

Lost a Flash Card? No Worries!

Printable Math Flashcards

If you’re like our family, flash cards have been a staple activity in the backseat of the car. I’m hoping this is setting an example for appropriate and fun things to do there well into the teenage years. Contemplating the future as a Dad can be stressful sometimes.

The cards themselves aren’t happy either. They get mangled in the seat mechanism, trampled under foot, used for impromptu note paper or sucked out the window. If you’re on the move with flash cards, you’d better plan on them being essentially disposable.

Enter Dad’s printable flash cards!

Read the rest of this entry »

Worksheet Updates and Happy Thanksgiving!

Some new worksheets for conversion between metric and customary length measurements have been posted at the link here…

Worksheets for Conversion Between Customary and Metric Lengths

I’d hoped to have conversions for volume measurements to help with those complex Thanksgiving recipes… Watch for these soon!

A few other updates were made to fix some minor grammar problems in the Money Word Problem worksheets… Thanks to the several folks who pointed this out.

I’ve also had a few more reports of people with worksheet printing problems, all of which seem to be related to the new Google PageSpeed caching service I setup over the summer. I’m going to try cranking a few settings down to see if this helps, but if not I’ll bite the bullet on some more expensive hosting to support the traffic without using this. Thanks for everybody’s patience working through these issues.

Meanwhile, I wish you and your families all a Happy Thanksgiving!

The Worksheets

Printable Flash Cards

Fact Family Math

Addition

Subtraction

Multiplication

Division

Spaceship Math Check-Off

Missing Operations

Long Division

Percentages

Negative Numbers

Graphic Fractions

Reducing Fractions

Comparing Fractions

Fraction Addition

Fraction Subtraction

Fraction Multiplication

Fraction Division

Fractions as Decimals

Factorization, GCD, LCM

Number Patterns

Patterns with Negatives

Mean, Median, Range

Word Problems

Pre-Algebra

Pre-Algebra Word Problems

Money Word Problems

Investing

Exponents

Order of Operations

Basic Geometry

Telling Analog Time

Analog Elapsed Time

Greater Than and Less Than

Numbers in Standard, Expanded and Word Form

Rounding Numbers

Ordering Numbers (Vertical)

Ordering Numbers

Preschool and Kindergarten

Graph Paper

Inches Measurement

Metric Measurement

Metric SI Unit Conversions

Imperial Unit Conversions

Conversions Between Customary and Metric

Picture Math Addition

Picture Math Subtraction

Picture Math Multiplication

Picture Math Division

Handwriting Paper

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