Snowed in

We're snowed in, so in addition to baking bread and making mushroom soup, we did some math today, something I've previously avoided doing with any kind of formal curricular approach.

I printed out the first 10 pages from Year 1 of the Centre for Innovation in Mathematics Teaching's Mathematics Enhancement Programme, decided to skip the actual lesson plans for the first few pages (since I was pretty sure Erika already got the concepts involved), and worked on the worksheets with Erika.

The only thing she had trouble with was an exercise on permutations ( at the bottom of page 4 )

She really didn't seem to understand the idea, so a couple of hours later I got out the Cuisenaire rods so we could practice. It made total sense to her with ( concrete objects )

I'm impressed so far with the Mathematics Enhancement Programme, and am looking forward to trying out some of their lesson plans soon.