entirelysonja

Today we got a Judy Clock used from someone on Homeschool Classifieds, and of course the kids wanted to use it right away. While Karl was napping, Erika asked to do math, so I suggested that we do some work on telling time.

I'd been planning to use the Math Mammoth Clock Worktext with Erika next year, but since she was interested today, I bought it and printed out the first few pages. Of course I could have just talked with her about it and let her play with the clock, but I find that Erika is much more willing to do enough work with an idea to really get it when we use someone else's curriculum. She doesn't respond well to having me suggest that she needs more practice with something, but she's willing to put in the practice when it was the curriculum author's idea. The concepts in the Math Mammoth workbook made sense to her, and she even successfully wrote things like "half past seven" and "six o'clock." I think it likely that she'll continue to be interested.

After we'd worked with telling time for a while, she asked to do some number line work, and then did half a page of Miquon as well.

She also finished lesson 49 in the Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading today, which we started using a few weeks ago when she expressed interest in a more formal approach to reading instruction. She seems excited that tomorrow, we'll be starting initial consonant blends -- something she's certainly encountered before, but not with the same degree of depth. I'd say that she doesn't particularly LIKE the Ordinary Parent's Guide, but it is helping her make progress with reading.

Right before dinner, the kids were watching an episode of a German TV show, "Die Sendung mit dem Elefanten," which happened to feature a science experiment. It involved lighting a candle in a plateful of water and then putting a glass over the candle to watch the candle extinguish and water get pulled up into the glass.

We decided to duplicate it after dinner and have further discussion. ( Some photos of the experiment )

Erika seemed to have a pretty good understanding of what was going on, especially since John was able to remind her of recent conversations they'd had about the three things fires need.

Today we did our second day of Domino Math. Yesterday's was pretty much straight out of MEP Year 1 lesson plan 21 (though we used bigger numbers), while today's was inspired by MEP lesson plan 22 with some Miquon thrown in. I had Erika pick out dominoes of her choice, write an addition problem with them, and show the same thing with Cuisenaire rods.

( A photo )

One thing I'm noticing is that there are areas where I need to start jumping over some of the MEP lesson segments. There's stuff Erika has thoroughly mastered, and just doesn't need more practice on. So I may need to start putting more energy into figuring out which parts of each lesson would be worthwhile, and which ones I should never even put out there.

Oh, and the best math moment from yesterday was when I asked her if she was done writing 6 dots, and she said something like, "no, I haven't done two threes yet." :-)

Erika was not really "getting" the less than or equals sign and the greater than or equals sign, plus she was unenthused about subtraction, so I decided today to make it more fun with some M & M's.

I put M & M's on each side of a symbol, and asked her to take away M & M's (eating the ones that were taken away) in ways that preserved the correctness of th mathematical expression. Well, what I actually said was more like, "Ok, now where can you take away an M & M and still have it be right?"

( Picture of M & M lesson )

By the end of several exercises like this, I think she had a pretty good grasp of the "greater than or equals" and "less than or equals" signs.

We also did a bunch of subtraction problems, which was indeed made considerably more fun by being allowed to eat the M & M's that were subtracted.

After we spent some time on M & M math, we did a bunch of other stuff, including having her complete patterns like "1, 3, 5, ..." and "10, 8, 6, ..." orally, without me telling her what the pattern was. All in all, a very good day of math.

This morning the kids decided to "play school" and told us they were "math kids." Karl even had to put his backpack on to go to school. Aww...

Later, we worked on lesson plan 6 from MEP Year 1. I involved both of the kids in an exercise where we threw balls back and forth and shouted out opposites (tall/short, left/right, up/down, etc.). Then when Karl was napping, Erika and I did most of the rest of the lesson. It took a really long time because we went off on some tangents, which I thought was fine. After all, part of what drew me to homeschooling in the first place was the idea that it would be possible to spend more time on whatever interested the kids, instead of being constrained by predefined time blocks.

One of the exercises involved drawing a figure like this:

            *
         *
      *     *
   *     *
*     *     *
   *     *
      *     *
         *
            *

The idea was to then count the number of dots in each column. Which was all well and good, but then, at my suggestion, we spent some time drawing lines between the dots to make triangles. Erika then also drew a second collection of dots for us to make triangles out of.

Another activity involved drawing a ladder and labeling each rung with a numeral from 1-10, so we could count up, count down, and count by 2's. Erika decided to augment the ladder by adding 11 and 12 to the top of it, and putting the corresponding number of dots next to each numeral.

I bought some used Cuisenaire Rods to go along with my Miquon math materials. Even though I'm not planning to use the Miquon materials yet, I wanted to get some Cuisenaire Rods so I could do some of the exercises myself and figure out how many of them we needed.

Just from giving the kids the opportunity to play with them once, I can see that I need a lot more!

( Picture of kids playing with Cuisenaire Rods )

I also got the "First Grade Diary" yesterday, which gives the experiences of the developers of the Miquon Math program teaching first grade one year. It's very helpful, and makes clear that the kids in the Miquon school had access to LOTS of Cuisenaire rods during their frequent free play sessions.