Category: Math

Supplementing Math

Tracy

For those of you who have been following for any length of time, you are familiar with the trouble we’ve had in math. I must say, sometimes I do get discouraged, thinking to myself, “After all, this is kindergarten. How hard can it really be?”

But to be honest, it’s not the material itself as much as the curriculum and the pace of the material presented. I love A Beka for a number of reasons, and their math is a year ahead of nearly every curriculum I’ve looked at recently (which provided some peace of mind to my struggles). For my son, who is an early kindergartener (he turns five in just a few weeks), the new material moves too quickly. Before he has a handle on one thing, he has three more concepts to learn.

So this year has been a series of using and not using A Beka. I get stuck, pull it out, and follow it to the letter for awhile. We’ll slowly make some progress only to be land-blasted by a million new things before we’re ready. So, I’ll shelve it again. We’ve done this in a continual cycle all year, loosely following the scope and sequence all the way.

Where are we right now? A Beka is back on the shelf.

What are we doing for math? Supplemental worksheets, games, and creative drill. I’m loving it, and so is my son.

In my search for a new curriculum or a supplement, I stumbled upon Math Mammoth, and I really love her style and ideas. But what I have appreciated most are her sample worksheets. Visit her site, sign up for either of her email subscription options, and she sends you files that include 300 worksheets and samples from 1st-6th grade. (Her first grade is equivalent to A Beka’s K5.) Because her pace is slower, her worksheets provide a lot of drill and plenty of time to grasp new concepts. Plus, she opens each segment with game ideas and websites for even more reinforcement. I’ve used a lot of her ideas and been inspired with a few of my own.

The result? He’s finally getting some of his addition concepts down! Slow but steady progress.

 

 

Number bonds have been key: discovering different ways to put two numbers together to produce the same sum. Taking her ideas, I’ve had him copy combinations down from his Dot Cards. For instance, from this card he tells me and then writes 4+3 and 3+4. We’ve also played this with our counting bears. I’ll hand him five or six bears, and he writes down all the combinations he can make by grouping the bears into different stacks. He loves the hands-on; I love the subtle drill. And best of all, he’s getting it!

The other night at supper, he was telling me all of the different combinations he could make from the four pineapple chunks on his plate. I couldn’t have been happier!

 

Another fun Math Mammoth game idea that I’ve played with both kids (with great success) suggests that you select a certain number of manipulatives (we played with six counting bears). Then, players cover their eyes while one player takes some bears (or other manipulative) and hides what he has taken. We each took turns taking away. Then, the rest of the players uncover their eyes and try to guess how many were taken.

Am I going to purchase Math Mammoth in the future? Absolutely! She has her material split up in two ways: by grade level and by topic. I can easily purchase the worksheets for the topics that I need to supplement, and the supplements are really cheap (starting at $2.oo for a download).

Though I wouldn’t have chosen the difficulties of this year, I must say that I have loved all of the ways I’ve learned to make math fun! It’s been a very rewarding supplement to the necessary drills.

 

 

Pom-pom Place Value

Tracy

I’ve loved our pom-pom magnets that we made awhile back. But up to this point, Little One has been the only one to use them. So the other day, I pulled them out for our place value lesson.

On our magnetic white board, I drew the three place value houses. Little One, who is always wanting to be in the big middle of Big Brother’s lessons anyway, was allowed to choose how many pom-poms went in each house. Then, my son wrote the number below the houses and read it off to us. He’s always so impressed when the numbers are larger than one hundred.

It was so much fun! I think place value is my favorite math concept to teach—so many fun ways to practice it.

The Miracle of Combination Dot Cards

Tracy5 Comments on The Miracle of Combination Dot Cards

We’ve definitely had our struggles with math this year, among other things. And though I nearly switched math curriculums mid-year, I discovered that what I really needed was not so much a new approach as a few added resources.

The journey

After a few hours on the internet one afternoon (following a particularly frustrating morning of math), lots of research and reading, and a phone call to a classical education curriculum representative, I finally concluded that the answer was not as “simple” as switching curriculums. I believed in the method of memorizing over “learn by doing” when it came to math, and rather than switch to another curriculum that stressed drill and repetition, I decided I’d stick with what was hailed as the ultimate in drill and repetition (i.e. A Beka Book).

But I knew that I did need something to make my A Beka math work better. My epiphany—flashcards. As in, the ones the curriculum recommends but that I was too cheap to buy. But I will say, that even after my epiphany I was too cheap to buy them new. Instead, I scoured Amazon and eBay. And prayed.

The search

I lost out on several eBay bids (I hate bidding on eBay) before resorting to a “buy it now” item and a couple of Amazon deals. Overall, I still saved nearly $50 buying used flashcards. And—oh!—what a worthy investment.

My favorite have been the Combination Dot Cards, the ones I thought would be a definite “over-spend” at the beginning of the year. These cards are ingenious, even bordering on the miraculous. The cards themselves are akin to giant dominoes with dots on each half of the card. The student reads the card as an addition problem based on how you are holding it.

For instance, if you have three dots on top and 2 on bottom, the child says “3+2=5.”  Then, you turn the card so that the 2 dots are now on top and the three dots are on bottom, and the child says “2+3=5.” You can also do the same thing by holding the cards horizontally and reading left to right. The cards can be used for subtraction as well, but we’re not there yet.

 

 

The success

The cards address the exact problems that my son was encountering. First, just learning the addition families was giving him some trouble. But even more difficult for him was reversing the numbers in a combination. Once he learned 1+2 he would still be utterly stumped at 2+1.

My son’s reaction to his new cards— all smiles. (As well as a possessive “that’s mine” when his sister came to take a look; which of course resulted in Sister’s rebuttal of “no, it’s mine,”and Mommy intervening with “Actually, they’re mine.”) And I’m so thankful I get to share.

How to have fun with flashcards

Tracy1 Comment on How to have fun with flashcards

I love to use flashcards with the kids. It might sound dry and boring and really old-fashioned, but we do have fun with them. And the kids respond really well to them. Here are a few ideas of how we use our flashcards.

  • I try to introduce new flashcards only one or two at a time. We talk about the new flashcard, and then I hide the new card in the stack, close to the front. Every time the new flashcard shows up, the kids stand up and shout “hello” to the new card (I join in with them until they are doing fairly well on their own). Then, I hide the card again just a little bit further in the stack. We do this several times depending on how many cards there are in the stack. For example, I just added the number 8 to the little one’s stack of numbers flashcards. We talked about the number eight, counted to eight, traced the eight on the card. Then, I hid the card about 2 to 3 cards from the front as we both said, “Goodbye, Mr. Eight.” When she got to the card and recognized it as our new card, she jumped up and we both said, “Hello, Mr. Eight” and then we hid it again.
  • Another game we’ve played with flashcards is our matching game. This works particularly well with the capital and small letter flashcards. First, I spread all of the cards out on the floor in random order. Her job is to match the baby letter to the daddy letter. When she makes a set, she hands the cards to me and tells me the names and sounds of the letters.

  • My son loves to beat his own time, to see how fast he can get through a big stack of cards. But every now and then, he gets stuck on a new card; and I have to get really creative. This last week the cards that gave us trouble were his new phonics sounds “ou in out” and “ow in owl.” He kept wanting to say short a or long o for the sound. After a few days of failed attempts, I finally thought of the wolf cry. He loved it. And the sound really stuck for him. So every time those cards come up in the stack we howl like wolves, and he remembers to use the right sound.

You can have fun with flashcards and drills. It’s all in how you choose to use them. So, it’s your turn. What are some fun ideas that you have used with your flashcards and drills?

A Living Math Treasure

Tracy

I happened upon this book on one of our library trips and decided to use it for one of our casual Friday lessons. Let me just tell you, this was such a fun math lesson to teach!

The Fly on the Ceiling: a Math Myth tells a humorous story of Rene Descartes and introduces the concept of Cartesian coordinates. The tale is very engaging and had the kids’ attention immediately. A great philosopher who is extremely messy has a problem: he can’t find anything! He takes a walk to think through his problem and is thinking so hard he steps off a dock into the ocean. Soaking wet and sick with a cold, he goes home to bed. The next day, as he lays in bed recuperating, he notices a fly on the ceiling and decides to find out if the fly ever lands in the same spot twice. With a piece of charcoal, he sketches a grid onto his ceiling and with the coordinates he charts the fly’s landings. Then, in the midst of his fly observations, it suddenly occurs to him that he could chart his belongings and solve his problem of losing things. So he calls a neighboring painter to paint the grid on his floor, positions his possessions over the dried paint, charts where everything is based on his coordinate system, and hangs the chart on the wall.

The book admittedly is not entirely factual. But that, too, was a great lesson. I talked with the kids about what details they thought might be true and what parts of the story were probably pretend. They could pretty easily decide between the fact and the fiction.

Next, we plotted our own Cartesian coordinates.

And pulled out our counting bears.

The book used numbers for both sets of coordinates, so we did too. But on hind sight, it would have been easier for them to have had a set of letters and a set of numbers for the coordinates. Nevertheless, the story and the lesson was highly entertaining and educational. What more could you want out of math!

For more fun with cartesian coordinates, check out this link.

Homemade Abacus

Tracy2 Comments on Homemade Abacus

My son has been struggling a little bit (okay, a lot) with math lately, and specifically with before and after. So, I put together this rather quaint number line/abacus out of what I had around the house. It’s not much to look at, but it works great! And we’ve had a lot of fun counting our numbers, practicing before and after, and even doing a little addition.

I took an old wire hanger, some mini clothes pins, and a black ink pen for the project. Numbers 1-35 fit nicely on the wire with plenty of room to move them back and forth, and that will keep us plenty busy for awhile, I’m sure.

He did really well using the numbered side for before and after; however, he had a much harder time doing addition. The written numbers threw him off. For addition, I turned the hanger around to the blank side of the clothes pins.

Also, another trick for the addition families that is working so much better. Rather than memorizing them by 1+ or 2+ families as most teach them, we’ve reverted to the A Beka method of teaching the families by the sum:

One Family

0+1=1

1+0=1

Two Family

0+2=2

1+1=2

2+0=2

Three Family

0+3=3

1+2=3

2+1=3

3+1=3

And you get the idea from there. Math keeps me on my toes. I’m constantly on the search for something to help my son with math. So if anyone else has any stunning ideas, I am very open to them. Please feel welcome to comment or email me with your words of wisdom.

Adjusting Abeka Kindergarten

Tracy

For those of you following along, you know we’ve had some issues with Abeka Kindergarten. We are on lesson 119 in Phonics and lesson 95 in Numbers, and the pace has been murderous—even with minor adjustments. So I thought I’d update you all on what we’ve decided to do differently.

Handwriting

Handwriting has been a continual adjustment. My first adjustment was to shorten the assignments. For instance, on some days, the assigments would require two pages (one page front and back) from the handwriting book in addition to about five lines of copywork. I found the copywork alone to be more than sufficient handwriting practice on those days.

My next step was to shorten the assignments to just one side of a page. First, because my poor son would work furiously to get the handwriting done and run out of time to color the pictures—a real bummer for a kindergartener. And second, because I really felt that he was getting more than enough practice throughout the day in his other exercises.

Then, Abeka started assigning “seatwork.” In other words, a child was now expected to do his handwriting and much of his phonics worksheets all by himself. “Great!” I thought to myself, “that will allow me plenty of time to work with the little one.” But that was only great in theory. The “working on his own” just wasn’t happening, even after moving him to his own special handwriting seat in the next room. My solution? Supervise handwriting and give him easier activities for his independent work (i.e. the lacing cards he begs me to do, some cutting practice, number puzzles, etc.; I’ve got files full of options).

I’m going to make one more adjustment, I think, before I’ve got this subject where I want it. I like having the copywork; I think it is an important skill. I also like having the handwriting sheets because it gives him a chance to write some of the words and specials sounds he is learning in phonics. But I think I want to vary those essentials by adding some other fun handwriting activities. I’ve got a “My First Sentence Building” game that has a handwriting wipe sheet for the child to copy the sentence he has made with the game pieces. And I have another similar activity with “funny sentence” puzzles to piece together. Each is providing handwriting practice but varying it so that we don’t feel like we are plodding through with no time to get to “the fun stuff.”

Phonics

My son’s main problem here was that the pace just went much too fast for him to master one thing before he was learning another. So I’ve nearly scrapped the lesson plans entirely and am making use of the materials in my own way. And, at least for now, I’m not worrying about the graded sheets; I’m treating them just like regular work sheets.

Additionally, I’ve added a few fun activities to vary our review of the material as well. For instance, one thing I noticed was that, although my son could rattle off all of the special sounds flashcards, he was not identifying those sounds when he saw them in words elsewhere. I’ve been combatting that problem in a couple of different ways. First, he does spell the sounds when he says them on the card: “s-t says st in stop.” Next, we play spelling games on the chalk board and with our felt letters to reinforce his knowledge of what letters make his special sounds.

I’ll call out either a word or a special sound, and he has to write the word or select the letters that make up the sound. Within just a few days, I saw a drastic improvement here. He still has trouble with “th” and “sh” sounds, but most of his other sounds he is grasping much better.

Spelling "pray"
Spelling "my"

A third activity I have done here is to reverse his special sounds flashcards. On the back of his cards are lists of words that begin with the special sound that is shown on the front. I show him the list of words, and he has to tell me what sound is on the front. And, of course, I have super dramatic reactions when I “try to trick him,” and he gets it right anyway. The first day we did this, he was rolling in the floor with delighted laughter. It was very rewarding to see.

Math

This is still my work in progress. He is acing his graded sheets still and doing well with flashcards and charts, but again the pace is so furious that we have no time to incorporate “living math,” the fun practical lessons of measuring things or playing dice games, number puzzles, money activities, etc. My goal here, even though I have yet to fully implement it, is to slow the pace where we cover the different sets of flashcards and charts on different days of the week instead of all of them every day. Next, I want to have work sheets on some days, computer math games on other days, and living math lessons on still other days.

Math adjustments are probably most difficult for me because I lack confidence. I’m not great in math, and I’m always afraid that my adjustments will cause him to miss out on a major step in the process toward understanding math. However, I feel strongly enough about what is missing from his Abeka math work, especially after comparing it to other curriculums, that I’m willing to try this adjustment. Abeka is miles ahead of everyone else on number recognition, addition, and counting; but I believe it’s rather at the expense of some of these other lessons—at least, from a homeschool point of view; a classroom approach might be totally different.

Praise the Lord, it has only taken me a couple of weeks to identify the trouble spots and find the adjustments I want to make! Last year, it took me nearly six months. We are well on our way, and every day I’m a little more satisfied with what we’ve got going.

And my son, he probably never knew we weren’t happy. The kid is wild about learning.