Cool Math Games

Cool math games can be real fun. I think more than kids, it is most enjoyed by adults. These games have been specifically designed for kids and it helps them to improve their calculation, arithmetic, manipulative, strategic skills, and problem solving skills too. Well, I understand that playing online games is something which not all parents will urge their children to. But then, if the games develop these skills then why not? I think that apart from bookish knowledge, kids learn more with practical knowledge. Playing these games can be one of them. Let's find out some cool math games for your kids.

Cool Math Games for Kids

Math Lines
This is my personal favorite. It is like one of those marble line games. In this game, there are marbles with numbers from 0-9 written on them. You will be given your marble which could have any number in between 0-9. Next, you will have to choose a number at the top. And then shoot that ball which makes the total which you chose at the top of it. Let me give you an example for better understanding. On the top of the table say for example, you chose number 10. Now you will have a big line of marbles with numbers written on them. Say if the ball with which you will be hitting has the number 4 on it, then from the marble lines you will have to hit a ball with number 6, so that the total becomes 10. Again, if your target ball shows up number 3 then you will have to hit on number 7 to make the total 10.

Math Lines: Xfactor
This cool brain game for kids is similar to the game above, but then the only difference is that instead of addition, here you will have to do multiplication. For example, at the top of the table if you choose the number 12, and if the number on your target ball is 3 then you will have to hit the ball with the 4 number ball. Again, the target ball is of the number 6 then you will have to hit the 2 numbered ball.

World's Best Universities

Top 400 Schools

Which schools made the top 400 list?

1. Harvard University (United States)
2. University of Cambridge (United Kingdom)
3. Yale University (United States)
4. UCL (University College London) (United Kingdom)
5. Imperial College London (United Kingdom)

See all 400 >>

What makes a good teacher?

Teachers are important and make a difference.   The quality of teaching is a crucial factor in promoting effective learning in schools.  Effective teaching requires individuals who are academically able and who care about the well-being of children and youth. 

Points Arising from Research

	The most powerful single factor that enhances achievement is feedback – positive, encouraging, clearly targeted.
	The setting of appropriate, specific and challenging goals is critical.
	Effective teachers make purpose and content explicit, plan carefully, use systematic assessment and feedback, make connections, encourage children to think about thinking and model what they want the children to do.

Key Elements of What makes a good teacher?

Research detailing the direct effect of good teaching on pupils is difficult to assess, as relating ‘good teaching’ directly to higher attainment in pupils is almost impossible to verify.   However there are many attempts to analyse what constitutes a ‘good teacher’.   The following points are generally agreed to have an impact on pupils:

Subject Matter Knowledge

Highly knowledgeable and up to date in their subject area, but do not pretend to know it all, willing to learn from pupils

Teachers’ repertoires of best practices

	Provide learner with clear tasks, goals, and requirement and inform them of progress made. A key skill in teaching is the ability to explain and describe things clearly
	Encourage pupils to think, to make connections, to practise and reinforce, to learn from other learners and to feel that if they make mistakes they will not be ridiculed or treated negatively
	Promote pupil participation through problem solving, questioning, discussion and “buzz group” activities
	Treat all pupil questions seriously and do not intimidate or ridicule
	Use regular informal assessment strategies including a range of types of questioning, observation and listening in
	Understand that, since individuals learn at different rates and in different ways, we need to provide a variety of activities, tasks and pace of work, and monitor and evaluate children’s progress
	Use breaks and activities to engage pupils’ thinking and interest
	Turn to reading and research for fresh insights and relating these to their classroom and school
	Work in a shared and collegial way with other staff

Personal qualities

	Demonstrate an empathy with pupil thinking, anticipate misconceptions and allow pupils to develop understanding in a variety of ways
	Observe pupils in class for signs that they are failing to keep up, are bored, or are not understanding
	Show flexibility in responding to pupil needs
	Genuinely want pupils to learn, understand and develop critical thinking abilities, as well as master content or learn skills
	Encourage pupils to take an active role in working through difficulties and take time to work through concepts in detail with those who have difficulties
	Teachers who show enthusiasm for subject, professional area and teaching role motivate pupils as they look forward to coming to that class
	Highly effective teachers are viewed as “easy going”, “relaxed”, with an “open” manner.   This brings a relaxed atmosphere to the classroom
	Communicate effectively
	Are resourceful and positive and adopt a problem-solving approach
	Are creative and imaginative and have an open attitude to change
	Are systematic and well organised, focused, determined and hardworking
	Demonstrate empathy and fairness, are caring and approachable

Teacher Competences

The Standard for Chartered Teachers states that the quality of the educational service depends pre-eminently on the quality of our teachers.   The standard then list the following 4 components:

	Professional values and personal commitments
	Professional knowledge and understanding
	Professional and personal attributes
	Professional action

At last - a beach book with a heart

The Island
by Victoria Hislop

It takes a brave writer to set her first novel on a Greek island, to populate it with an assortment of eccentric characters and follow the turbulent love lives of the women. All this against a backdrop of the Second World War. Brave because one might imagine that Louis de Bernières's Captain Corelli's Mandolin had already cornered the market in quirky Mediterranean love stories.

Victoria Hislop, however, has found a very different island, off Crete, for her first book. It is called Spinalonga and it is where lepers were banished to die.

Her story begins in London with Alexis Fielding, a self-assured young woman compelled to discover more about her Cretan mother's past, a past she is mysteriously unwilling to discuss. Her journey takes her back to Crete and to an old family friend who narrates Alexis's family history through three tumultuous generations.

The backbone of her tale is the relationship between two very different sisters: vibrant Anna who is as ambitious as she is beautiful, and Maria, obedient, sensible and faithful. While it might seem as though we've seen these types many times before, along with the loyal but dull husband, the lover who turns out to be a cad, the lovelorn widower who all also appear in the book, The Island fascinates when it shifts to Spinalonga.

Leprosy may be the world's oldest known disease, but it is also one of its most misunderstood. To the fishermen and their families on Crete who can see the leper colony, the first symptom - dry, numb patches on the skin - is to be dreaded. Leprosy, they imagine, is highly contagious. It means a slow and agonising path to death, cast out by loved ones and forced to live out your days with an incurable illness.

The revelation is that, in Hislop's imagination, Spinalonga is more civilised than many aspects of the mainland. There are deaths, but there are marriages, too. These are people imprisoned behind fortressed walls but they have rights and freedoms that gradually come to heal.

In many respects, despite its meticulous research into Cretan culture, Hislop has written a beach novel predictably packed with family sagas, doomed love affairs, devastating secrets. However, she also forces us to reflect on illness, both the nasty, narrow-mindedness of the healthy and the spirit of survival in the so-called 'unclean'. Her message seems as relevant today as it would have been a century ago. Same prejudice, different disease.

"The Island"

Victoria Hislop's first novel "The Island" is an international bestseller. It was selceted for the Richard and Judy Summer Read, and won Victoria the "Newcomer of the Year" Award at the Galaxy British Book Awards 2007. It has been translated into more than a dozen languages.

The art of slow reading

Is it time to slow our reading down?
Photograph: Steve Caplin

If you're reading this article in print, chances are you'll only get through half of what I've written. And if you're reading this online, you might not even finish a fifth. At least, those are the two verdicts from a pair of recent research projects – respectively, the Poynter Institute's Eyetrack survey, and analysis by Jakob Nielsen – which both suggest that many of us no longer have the concentration to read articles through to their conclusion.

The problem doesn't just stop there: academics report that we are becoming less attentive book-readers, too. Bath Spa University lecturer Greg Garrard recently revealed that he has had to shorten his students' reading list, while Keith Thomas, an Oxford historian, has written that he is bemused by junior colleagues who analyse sources with a search engine, instead of reading them in their entirety.

So are we getting stupider? Is that what this is about? Sort of. According to The Shallows, a new book by technology sage Nicholas Carr, our hyperactive online habits are damaging the mental faculties we need to process and understand lengthy textual information. Round-the-clock news feeds leave us hyperlinking from one article to the next – without necessarily engaging fully with any of the content; our reading is frequently interrupted by the ping of the latest email; and we are now absorbing short bursts of words on Twitter and Facebook more regularly than longer texts.

Which all means that although, because of the internet, we have become very good at collecting a wide range of factual titbits, we are also gradually forgetting how to sit back, contemplate, and relate all these facts to each other. And so, as Carr writes, "we're losing our ability to strike a balance between those two very different states of mind. Mentally, we're in perpetual locomotion".

Still reading? You're probably in a dwindling minority. But no matter: a literary revolution is at hand. First we had slow food, then slow travel. Now, those campaigns are joined by a slow-reading movement – a disparate bunch of academics and intellectuals who want us to take our time while reading, and re-reading. They ask us to switch off our computers every so often and rediscover both the joy of personal engagement with physical texts, and the ability to process them fully.

"If you want the deep experience of a book, if you want to internalise it, to mix an author's ideas with your own and make it a more personal experience, you have to read it slowly," says Ottawa-based John Miedema, author of Slow Reading (2009).

But Lancelot R Fletcher, the first present-day author to popularise the term "slow reading", disagrees. He argues that slow reading is not so much about unleashing the reader's creativity, as uncovering the author's. "My intention was to counter postmodernism, to encourage the discovery of authorial content," the American expat explains from his holiday in the Caucasus mountains in eastern Europe. "I told my students to believe that the text was written by God – if you can't understand something written in the text, it's your fault, not the author's."

And while Fletcher used the term initially as an academic tool, slow reading has since become a more wide-ranging concept. Miedema writes on his website that slow reading, like slow food, is now, at root, a localist idea which can help connect a reader to his neighbourhood. "Slow reading," writes Miedema, "is a community event restoring connections between ideas and people. The continuity of relationships through reading is experienced when we borrow books from friends; when we read long stories to our kids until they fall asleep." Meanwhile, though the movement began in academia, Tracy Seeley, an English professor at the University of San Francisco, and the author of a blog about slow reading, feels strongly that slow reading shouldn't "just be the province of the intellectuals. Careful and slow reading, and deep attention, is a challenge for all of us."

So the movement's not a particularly cohesive one – as Malcolm Jones wrote in a recent Newsweek article, "there's no letterhead, no board of directors, and, horrors, no central website" – and nor is it a new idea: as early as 1623, the first edition of Shakespeare's folio encouraged us to read the playwright "again and again"; in 1887, Friedrich Nietzsche described himself as a "teacher of slow reading"; and, back in the 20s and 30s, dons such as IA Richards popularised close textual analysis within academic circles.

But what's clear is that our era's technological diarrhoea is bringing more and more slow readers to the fore. Keith Thomas, the Oxford history professor, is one such reader. He doesn't see himself as part of a wider slow community, but has nevertheless recently written – in the London Review of Books – about his bewilderment at the hasty reading techniques in contemporary academia. "I don't think using a search engine to find certain key words in a text is a substitute for reading it properly," he says. "You don't get a proper sense of the work, or understand its context. And there's no serendipity – half the things I've found in my research have come when I've luckily stumbled across something I wasn't expecting."

Some academics vehemently disagree, however. One literature professor, Pierre Bayard, notoriously wrote a book about how readers can form valid opinions about texts they have only skimmed – or even not read at all. "It's possible to have a passionate conversation about a book that one has not read, including, perhaps especially, with someone else who has not read it," he says in How to Talk About Books that You Haven't Read (2007), before suggesting that such bluffing is even "at the heart of a creative process".

Slow readers, obviously, are at loggerheads with Bayard. Seeley says that you might be able to engage "in a basic conversation if you have only read a book's summary, but for the kinds of reading I want my students to do, the words matter. The physical shape of sentences matter."

Nicholas Carr's book elaborates further. "The words of the writer," suggests Carr, "act as a catalyst in the mind of the reader, inspiring new insights, associations, and perceptions, sometimes even epiphanies." And, perhaps even more significantly, it is only through slow reading that great literature can be cultivated in the future. As Carr writes, "the very existence of the attentive, critical reader provides the spur for the writer's work. It gives the author the confidence to explore new forms of expression, to blaze difficult and demanding paths of thought, to venture into uncharted and sometimes hazardous territory."

What's more, Seeley argues, Bayard's literary bluffing merely obscures a bigger problem: the erosion of our powers of concentration, as highlighted by Carr's book. Seeley notes that after a conversation with some of her students, she discovered that "most can't concentrate on reading a text for more than 30 seconds or a minute at a time. We're being trained away from slow reading by new technology." But unlike Bath Spa's Greg Garrard, she does not want to cut down on the amount of reading she sets her classes. "It's my responsibility to challenge my students," says Seeley. "I don't just want to throw in the towel."

Seeley finds an unlikely ally in Henry Hitchings, who – as the author of the rather confusingly named How to Really Talk About Books You Haven't Read (2008) – could initially be mistaken as a follower of Bayard. "My book on the subject notwithstanding," says Hitchings, "I'm no fan of bluffing and blagging. My book was really a covert statement to the effect that reading matters. It's supposed to encourage would-be bluffers to go beyond mere bluffing, though it does this under the cover of arming them for literary combat."

But Hitchings also feels that clear-cut distinctions between slow and fast reading are slightly idealistic. "In short, the fast-slow polarity – or antithesis, if you prefer – strikes me as false. We all have several guises as readers. If I am reading – to pick an obvious example – James Joyce, slow reading feels appropriate. If I'm reading the instruction manual for a new washing machine, it doesn't."

Hitchings does agree that the internet is part of the problem. "It accustoms us to new ways of reading and looking and consuming," Hitchings says, "and it fragments our attention span in a way that's not ideal if you want to read, for instance, Clarissa." He also argues that "the real issue with the internet may be that it erodes, slowly, one's sense of self, one's capacity for the kind of pleasure in isolation that reading has, since printed books became common, been standard".

What's to be done, then? All the slow readers I spoke to realise that total rejection of the web is extremely unrealistic, but many felt that temporary isolation from technology was the answer. Tracy Seeley's students, for example, have advocated turning their computer off for one day a week. But, given the pace at which most of us live, do we even have time? Garrard seems to think so: "I'm no luddite – I'm on my iPhone right now, having just checked my email – but I regularly carve out reading holidays in the middle of my week: four or five hours with the internet disconnected."

Meanwhile, Jakob Nielsen – the internet guru behind some of the statistics at the beginning of this article – thinks the iPad might just be the answer: "It's pleasant and fun, and doesn't remind people of work." But though John Miedema thinks iPads and Kindles are "a good halfway house, particularly if you're on the road", the author reveals that, for the true slow reader, there's simply no substitute for particular aspects of the paper book: "The binding of a book captures an experience or idea at a particular space and time." And even the act of storing a book is a pleasure for Miedema. "When the reading is complete, you place it with satisfaction on your bookshelf," he says.

Personally, I'm not sure I could ever go offline for long. Even while writing this article I was flicking constantly between sites, skimming too often, absorbing too little; internet reading has become too ingrained in my daily life for me to change. I read essays and articles not in hard copy but as PDFs, and I'm more comfortable churning through lots of news features from several outlets than just a few from a single print source. I suspect that many readers are in a similar position.

But if, like me, you just occasionally want to read more slowly, help is at hand. You can download a computer application called Freedom, which allows you to read in peace by cutting off your internet connection. Or if you want to remove adverts and other distractions from your screen, you could always download offline reader Instapaper for your iPhone. If you're still reading, that is.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/15/slow-reading