Hands On Math

Along side of our 'workbook' math we will be enjoying a lot of hands on math, a lot! She really enjoys the rainbow colored math books however the hands on learning - a visual - is in my eyes more important. We had toyed with a completely different math program for this year however I was afraid she would miss the workbook aspect, so I am creating my own hands on program along side of her workbook curricula.

Today we worked from a book of math poetry we own (we did this on her first day as well). The poem was about pairs of bugs in jars that a little girl collects. So, I found some free 'empty jar' graphics online I could print out and trimmed them all up. I made a page of bugs and trimmed them all up. And... a lesson was formed!

We read the poem and from it we talked about how certain types of poem end in rhyming words, like this one. So, we took the ends of stanzas and brainstormed out own list of rhyming words.

After did this we looked at the poem more carefully and talked about pairs. Then I had her take out all the paper jars & bugs I created and I presented her with math story problems. We did several of these, physically working them and she shared with me her results. "Teresa collected 24 bugs and put three in each jar. How many jars did she use?" (division/multiplication) Holly loved this! To finish the project she took some jars and drew her own bug collection in them. A fun lesson indeed!

Place Value Review

As we are gearing up for the upcoming school year I have decided to a bit of review work with Holly on subjects we didn't cover as in depth as I'd have liked last year. She had a great year in math and is a natural at it I think, however we did not do a whole lot with place value in her Kindergarten work - I wanted to get a jump start on that for this year.

I picked up this great book that is completely on place value and we broke out some of our manipulatives. I was worried it would take a bit for her to get it... not at all. She picked it up immediately! Once she picked up the pattern and made the connection she moved right on to connecting the place values of  1s,10s, 100s and 1,000s. We'll still do some more review to really solidify it for her, she enjoys playing with it all. I think being pretty quick at adding has already helped with grasping this concept - but now I want to reverse it for her and show the approach of breaking her math into tens and hundreds for quicker calculations.