Summer Olympics: Use them to teach kids math

The summer Olympics in London this week and next offer a great opportunity to emphasize math with your kids, says Laura Overdeck, a New Jersey mother of three and founder of "Bedtime Math."

Overdeck offers these ways to seize the opportunity:

1. Have your own Olympic-style race outside. Use a stopwatch to time each family member and then compare times to see who finished fastest.

2. Keep track of medals won. Create a chart on a poster board and use gold, silver, and bronze stars to track medal wins.

3. Use a measuring tape to measure how far your child can throw a baseball, or see how much distance he or she can cover in a long jump-inspired leap.

4. Count everything. As you’re watching the different sports competitions, ask your children to tell you how many players are on the field, lanes are in the pool or countries are represented in a particular event.

Bedtime Math is a website that offers a new, free math problem each day with levels of difficulty for different age groups, so parents can do them with their children. Overdeck's goal is making the nightly math problem as common as the bedtime story.

Here's an example of a nightly Bedtime Math problem; the daily problems can be found here:

Wee ones: Porcupines are the 3rd-largest rodent, after the capybara and the beaver. If you have 2 capybaras, 2 beavers and 2 porcupines as pets, how many pet rodents do you have?

Little kids: If your pet porcupine’s body is 25 inches long and its tail is 10 inches long, how long is your pet from nose to tip of tail? Bonus: If your porcupine weighs 25 pounds, how much more do you weigh?

Big kids: If you have 2 pet porcupines, and the big one has the typical 30,000 quills (yikes) while the little guy has half of that, how many quills does the smaller porcupine have? Bonus: How many quills do they have together?