A Mathematical Mystery Tour: Higher-Thinking Math Tasks (Grades 5-12)

A Mathematical Mystery Tour has been used by thousands of students and has inspired adults to greater appreciation of the secret number language of nature. It is multidisciplinary, visual, and hands-on, practicing skills while also requiring deep math thinking. The activities are reproducible and each is accompanied with informational teacher pages giving answers, historical notes, teacher suggestions, and activity extensions.

Let this geographically alive Mystery Tour integrate math with art, science, philosophy, history, social studies, and language arts. The use of the calculator, geometric construction, metric measurement, problem solving, formulating results, building models and making inferences is woven throughout the book.

Each book purchase includes a link to a downloadable student newspaper, the Mathematical Mystery Tour Guide, coordinated with the book content. It is capable of being broken up into various assignments and handed out as print or sent whole electronically to each student. It is filled with games, riddles, dramatic historical information, crosswords, provocative questions, and additional math thought activities.

Mark Wahl is a nationally known mathematics learning specialist and author. He has evolved his graduate training in pure mathematics and math education into three decades of teaching, development of unusual math pedagogy, and reform of curriculum in all the grade levels. His specialties include creative strategies of math instruction, the psychology of math anxiety, cross-curricular activities with math, and tapping the multiple intelligences for learning. Located near Seattle, he is currently director of Mark Wahl Learning Services and executive editor of LivnLern Press, both enterprises dedicated to unblocking and accelerating math skill development in youths and adults.