Math Map

Freebie: Medieval Math Cards and Synesthesia

Do numbers have personality and gender to you? Fueds, family trees, romances…sibling squabbles? Or are they just numbers?

This question came up in my Challenge A class, and out of six kids and a few adults, only one kid and one mom didn’t do this. Since I’ve done this for as long as I can remember…involuntarily with both notes/music notation and math/numbers, I sort of assumed everyone did it to some extent (except for Jim because he’s one of those weird spreadsheet people). Obviously, 0 is the patriarch and 1 is his firstborn son who’s been such a disappointment to him. 2 is the matriarch… 7 is the perfect child who drives his siblings crazy because he really shouldn’t be…etc etc etc.

Turns out that’s an actual thing called Ordinal-Linguistic Personification, which is a form of synesthesia. A large percentage of kids do it, but they usually outgrow it. Only 1% of the adult population has Ordinal-Linguistic Personification, so I guess Jim’s not the weird one after all. There are other types of synesthesia too! Some of them I’ve never even heard of:


Grapheme-color synesthesia – associating letters or numbers with specific colors.

Ordinal-linguistic personification (OLP) – attributing personalities or genders to numbers, letters, or days of the week.

Chromesthesia – hearing sounds and involuntarily seeing colors.

Lexical-gustatory synesthesia – associating words with specific tastes.

Auditory–Tactile Synesthesia – Hearing a sound causes a feeling somewhere on your body.

So now I’m super curious about who else is a closet synesthete. 👀


But back to math, this whole number personification thing has made math discussions in class and at home so much more interesting. I was listening to the math map podcast and Dr. Gilpin recommended making your own number cards for quick arithmetic games…it’s hard sometimes to remember what numbers kings and queens are and if we decided aces were high or low. Plus, it would be nice if the cards went up to 15 like we do with skip counting.

Soooo, thanks to the power of the internet and a little late-night insomnia, here are some personified number cards for all your little creative math geniuses (or right-brained ADHD-prone kids). If you want four suites like regular playing cards, print two sets. (make sure you select “fit to page” otherwise your printer will chop off the color). You can make blue cards negative numbers and red cards positive numbers…you can add the red and minus the blues…or multiply and divide. The sky is the limit! (I included a whole list of quick, fast medieval-themed math games that will tempt even the most dysgraphic sensitive kid into doing math…perhaps even liking it)
Enjoy.

(and if you’re looking for other screen-free homeschooling help like Challenge A survival Latin or Cartography, you can find them here.)

Life from the blind Tilt-A-Whirl and Grumpy Cat Math Notation flashcards

I thought tutoring Challenge A this year was going to be easy because I’ve done it so many times. I remember the ol days when students circled typos in It couldn’t just happen, backline maps were in the back of the guide and the math map wasn’t even a gleam in anyone’s eye.

Then I got a corneal ulcer from some sort of death ray staph/mrsa which in my imagination looks like the eye of Sauron erupting on the top left side of my left iris. It’s not only taken out a good bit of my vision, but it also makes my eye spasm like I’m on some sort of hellish carnival ride with strobe lights. All of my dreams for a smooth school start have come crashing down, but in some ways it’s good, the kids are all pitching in and my 3rd born may turn out to be my most independent Challenge A kid yet.

Of course if I could have chosen a year to have this happen, I wouldn’t have chosen The-Year-Of-The-Math-Map to be a director, but here we are. Our class is slowly sampling and nibbling at this advanced math feast, and I think good conversations and connections are being made. But holy wow, I cannot handle the math notation flashcards. I don’t know if it’s because I’m half blind, or it’s my ADHD or what, but my brain cannot handle the double-sided flashcards with the definition matching the opposite side. I look at it over and over, confusing myself even more and more.

In a fit of internal angst…over so many things, I made Grumpy Cat Math Notation flashcards. Since Math symbols can have a variety of definitions, I put the main on in the speech bubble, and all the extra information in Grumpy Cat’s thought bubble. First tour students can work on the speech bubble level, and more advanced folk can memorize the extra information.

Since It really is quite difficult to see (especially a computer screen…this blog entry is being typed with my eyes closed and shoutout to Grammarly), I only have the first 4 weeks done (15 pages total, so if you do one page a week you should have them memorized by Christmas and can start over and review in the 2nd Semester).

That said, here they are! Enjoy.

GrumpyCatMathNotationFlashcardsDownload

If you’d like an update when I have the rest of them done, you can give me your email here and I’ll let you know when they’re all up.

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P.S. If you aren’t in Classical Conversations and have no clue what I’m talking about, thank your lucky stars. Although if you think it sounds fun to teach your child the definition of a radix point or the Greek phi (not to be confused with pi), then by all means feel free to include them in on the fun. Math is for everyone! We’re in our math era.

Printing tips: Print black and white and save ink and toner if you’re printing on thin paper otherwise you can kind of see the answers. Select “double sided” or “print on both sides” and then select “head to head” or “flip on long edge”. Make sure the orientation is set to “portrait” and hit print!

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