Magic Tricks

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I like using magic tricks to get student’s attention. Along the way, they are learning a lot as you explain and show using language. A great way for rich language learning. Here’s a favorite I used to use with my kids.

I”ll guess your birthday Magic Trick

Ask your students to do the following, calculating for their own birthday. Go slow and repeat the instructions so they follow along. Use the board to show an example.

  • Enter the number 7 (7)
  • Multiply by the month of your birth (7×6=63)
  • Subtract 1 (63-1=62)
  • Multiply by 13 (62×13=806)
  • Add the day of your birth (806+8=814)
  • Add 3 (814+3=817)
  • Multiply by 11 (817×11=8987)
  • Subtract the month of your birth (8987-9=8978)
  • Subtract the day of your birth (8987-8=8970)

Now the fun! – Ask a student to tell you their result. In your head, quickly do the following

  • Divide by 10 (8970/10=897)
  • Add 11 (897+11=908)
  • Divide by 100 (908/100 = 9.08 )

Tell the student their birthday!  (for example, using my own – Sept. 8th).

They will be amazed! Tell a few more students when their birthday is. For homework ask them to try and find out how you did it! They’ll come up with some creative answers!

There are a lot of amazing science and math tricks that teachers can learn easily and which offer very powerful engagement AND language learning activities.

Magic Tricks3.455

This post was submitted by David Deubelbeiss.

5 Responses to Magic Tricks

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Mark from Easy Magic Secrets

January 22nd, 2010 at 2:01 pm

Very Cool!

I hope you don’t mind, but I shared this on my blog (with a link back to this site of course):

http://easymagicsecrets.com/for-all-you-math-geeks/

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David Deubelbeiss

February 7th, 2010 at 2:46 pm

Sure! It is a quite common thing but I used it so often when first substitute teaching, I could do it so fast it really seemed like magic. Students would think I looked in their files or something….

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Daniel K

March 4th, 2010 at 9:44 am

I love using magic, too! I found that back when I worked at an academy, it was a great way to open class and break the ice a bit, or as a reward to close class. As a Korean public school teacher (with about 30 students per class), however, it’s a lot harder to find opportunities to use magic in the classroom.

One challenge I found at the academy, though, was sometimes a few students (especially in the bigger classes) would interpret magic time as free, “speak in Korean with their friends” time. It would take effort to draw them back into the magic trick.

I also had students who became obsessed with certain tricks, and some even figured out how to do them by themselves! With an advanced class I had been doing lots of magic with, I actually copied the pages from the magic book and let them try to learn it by themselves!

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pei yi

May 23rd, 2010 at 2:52 pm

why is it must be 7 at first?

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Julie

January 4th, 2011 at 11:39 am

Hi!! thank you for the useful icebreaking magic! planning to use it in my class.:)
by the way, the example in the post has the number “6″ instead of “9″ in the second step: 7 X 6

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