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Pam Sorooshian is a mathematician (statistician) and parent who writes an unschooling blog. She has interesting things to say about what mathematicians do and how they do it. Here is her blog.

I teach at Eleanor Roosevelt Community Learning Center, a charter school that works with homeschool families. One of the most popular supplementary courses I teach on campus is called Math Explorations, which is open to students from second grade through high school. To make a class like this work, each class session is a self-contained activity-based lesson that can be appreciated at different levels by different students. Here is a list of topics from the class. (I am little-by-little adding complete descriptions of the activites.) I also maintain a resource page for home schoolers on the ERCLC site which covers all the core subject areas + home schooling issues.

How do you fold a regular pentagon from a square piece of paper? Here is a javascript slide show of one way to do it invented by the author.

Here is a way to solve a maze instantly with a computer paint program. This solution came out of a session of the Math Explorations class as the students and teacher were all working mazes and talking about them on different levels. Is this solution cheating? In a sense any time you solve a problem you are depriving someone else of the opportunity to work it out for themselves, but problems are made to be solved. A clever solution to one problem might inspire new insights that can lead to new and better problems and solutions.

At the 2005 Home School California conference in Sacramento I did a workshop in which we did a "Funhouse Mirrors" project with mirrored paper was wrapped around a soda can. It was a very popular activitiy and some of the participants wanted to know where to find additional worksheets. They were generated with The Geometer's Sketchpad. Here is a zip file containing the GSP file that generates the images and a PDF file of the worksheets, in case you don't have The Geometer's Sketchpad yet. (Key Curriculum Press has a partially crippled Instructor's Evaluation Version that can be downloaded for 60-day trial. Whether a homeschool parent can be considered to be an instructor, for this purpose, is between you and Key Curriculum Press. In any case, here is the link.)

Below is the construction for a single point. Done manually, each point would have to be transformed in this way. Done with The Geometer's Sketchpad, the point behind the mirror can be made to outline a figure and the point in front of the mirror will trace out the distorted image.

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