what we're loving...

... right now.

I have decided that I need to qualify all statements like that with something like "right now" or "at this moment"... because, quite frankly, things change.

This is a recent find from the library...

How High Can a Dinosaur Count?: ...and Other Math Mysteries

I'm trying to incorporate more "living math" into Clara's day so I picked up some random books at the library last week. This one has been a huge hit. There's a little word problem for each picture and several bonus questions listed in the back. She loves working with this book.

Alex just started this book last week...

Practice Island by Michael Clay Thompson

We had finally finished up Grammar Island, so when we started Sentence Island, we started this book as well. Who would have thought that Alex would enjoy "four level analysis" of sentences? We do these together and work through them aloud as he writes. I really thought he would balk at doing this book when it came time, but it has really surprised me!

And then there's this book...

Life of Fred Fractions

We're still loving this book... although I will admit that Alex ummm... strongly dislikes the "bridge" portions. He loves the rest of the book though and has really gotten a lot out of it. Because of the humor and continuing story line, he can't wait to keep working his way through the book. I'm excited to see that there are enough books in the series to keep us busy for years.

games for math

A good friend of mine let me borrow one of her books the other day...

Games for Math

It is such a cool little book! I have acquired quite a collection of math game books but haven't really loved any of them. Then my friend let me borrow this one. First of all, it does not require a collection of fancy materials to make the games work. And for the most part, there is no prep.

I decided to try out our first game yesterday. Clara and I played in the morning and she enjoyed it so much that she wanted to teach Alex how to play that afternoon.


Basically, each child rolled the die twice. On the first roll, they made that many big circles on their card. On their second roll, they made that many items inside each big circle.

Then we wrote out the problem two ways...
First as an addition problem, then as a multiplication problem.

So, in the case of Clara's pink card at the bottom...on her first roll she got a six, so she made six big circles. Her second roll, she got a two, so she made two little circles inside each big circle.

Since we were only concerned about the little circles, her addition equation looked like this:

2+2+2+2+2+2=12

and her multiplication equation looked like this:

2x6=12

She didn't actual "do" the multiplication. We worked more on the concept of how to set up the equation and seeing the relationship between it and the addition equation.

Oh... back to the game... whoever had the highest answer on their card got to keep both cards. In the end, the person with the most cards won. I'm not sure if that was how it was outlined in the book but that's how it ended up at our house. The kids love to play war so they just treated it like a different version of that game.

I can't wait to try more of the games from this book!

setting up shop

So, the other day I mentioned that I had ordered some new homeschool stuff.... in that stack was this...

Simply Charlotte Mason
Your Business Math Series - Pet Store

We've only been at it this week but my goodness has it been a hit so far! The grade range on this product is listed as grades 3-6... but I'm using it with my two which are 1st and 3rd grade.

They are so incredibly into it. We spent a couple of days deciding what inventory we needed to open our store. It was slow going... but Alex got lots of practice with multiplication as he extended the costs.

Then we had to make our price tags. They worked as a team. Alex did the mark-up calculations and Clara recorded them in the book....
Alex got an introduction to division through this exercise. And through our initial exercise of extending the costs, we even eased Clara into some multiplication... she's very proud of herself since she's doing multiplication too (it doesn't matter to her that the questions that we ask her help on are multiplying by 0's or 1's.... since she's good at skip counting by 5's we've been having her "help" us on those as well). It's been a very easy program to adapt to each kid's individual ability. They each have their main role.... Alex will be working more with figuring orders and Clara will be keeping track of inventory. It's so amazing to me how easily they grasp new concepts when there is an actual purpose to what they're learning.

Once the prices were figured... they excitedly asked if they could actually make a pet store. Why not? So, they've been working feverishly at setting up their shop.... they even worked on it until bedtime tonight (school on a Friday night???) :-)

Here's the progress so far....
They've taken over an old secretary that's currently hanging out in what will, at some point, be my office. On top you have some finished pet food bags (those yet to be colored are on the bottom there)..... the rest is hard to see... but the bigger wads of yarn are leashes and the smaller ones are collars.

Here's Alex showing off a newly finished dog food bag...
some dogs who are waiting for a new home....
and the cats...
After I took these photos they went digging through their stuffed animals looking for birds and rabbits to add to their store.

They absolutely cannot wait to have their first customers! I love seeing them so excited about math... I can't wait to see what else they have in mind for their store!

fractions...

Alex has hit a point with his math that he just needs to take a bit of a break. I love that with homeschooling we are able to do this. Even though he's taking a break from his math curriculum, we still "do math".

Last week I got out these two books, although we only got partway through the top one, Fractions are Parts of Things. I took the photo before we sat down to work on them and I thought we would go through them faster than we did.

To be honest, we only got through a small portion of the Fractions book (a mere fraction of it... I amuse myself sometimes).

We would have gotten through more of the book had Alex not become so obsessed with finding halves of things....

We looked around the house at windows and furniture. We built some items ourselves from their geometry tool kits and our bucket of shapes. We even photocopied some of the trickier ones out of the book and cut up the copies in order to really see the halves.

While Alex got carried away with finding halves, Clara made this....
...a flower in a vase.

So, again... not exactly what I had in mind. I had in mind that we would breeze through two books... happily absorbing some of the material and moving on. I imagined that we would work on these books together... start to finish.

Instead...

Alex didn't get exposure to all of the different fractions... but he understands half really well. He knows now that "half" isn't always obvious and that it can be found different ways.

Clara didn't stay engaged long... but she too learned quite a bit more about halves than she would have if we had gotten through the entire book in one sitting. She also explored geometric designs using our shape blocks.... creating a beautiful, intricate, symmetrical design in the base of her vase.

Sometimes the way things turn out is not just different.... but sometimes better.

help wanted

Lately the lines between between "school" and "home" have become blurred... one begins to flow seamlessly into the other... there is no clear distinction.

One recent example of this is our "Help Wanted" board. My husband and I decided that the kids needed to work on their money management skills and Clara needed more experience with recognizing and counting coins. So, instead of buying a curriculum, we set up the "Help Wanted" board.

Please forgive how messy my writing is... if you could only see the position I had to be in in order to reach the white board, you would understand. :-)

I don't know how else to write this so I'm going to do it in bullet points:

1. The kids have specific assigned chores that are not on the board.

These are required each day and if done every day, they receive their base pay of $1. If not done everyday, payment for all other chores is forfeited (more on this later).

2. "Help Wanted" chores are completely optional.

We assigned the things that MUST be done (feed the dog, fill the dog's water dish, making beds, etc.). Everything on our list is optional... all things that would be really nice if they happened, but no big deal if they didn't. Or they are things that I was doing anyway... so them doing the item lessened my work, but didn't increase it if they didn't chose that item.

3. All chores pay less than $.50.

We did this because we wanted the kids to be able to reasonably SAVE for the things they wanted... not outright BUY whatever they wanted. We wanted them to really think about what they would use their money for once they had enough.

4. They may only have one chore selected at a time.

When they see a chore they would like to do, they put their initial next to the line. Once it is done, I check it and they may select another chore. This avoids the first one to the board selecting all of the choice jobs, before the other one has a chance.

We're a few weeks into this and so far so good. We had a glitch last week where near the end of the week they both missed a morning of their required chores. By the rules they were to forfeit all of their money earned that week. We quickly saw that this would not work since their motivation to do any chores (even their required ones) waned since they weren't earning anything any more. So, we told them that if it remained just that one time, we would assign them an extra non-paying task during the weekend that would "erase" the missed chore morning. So, one afternoon last weekend they folded and put away all of their clean clothes (which was usually one of the higher paying chores on the board).

Alex is saving his money for a new video game. He has been searching different sites seeing where he would get the best deal. He's thinking about whether he should buy it a) from the Lego store, with the highest price and shipping but he could use a Lego gift card that he has, b) order it from WalMart who has the lowest price but has shipping costs or c) order from Amazon with a slightly higher price but free shipping. I like seeing that he's really thinking about his purchase and what is the best deal for his money.

Clara saw a Webkinz in a store last Tuesday that she HAD to have.. it was the last one and she was afraid that they would be sold out by the time she had enough money saved. So, since she had enough money to pay 1/4 of the cost, I purchased the Webkinz and set up a layaway plan at home. The toy stays on my desk and she is not allowed to play with it until it is paid off. We each have little receipts to keep track of her payments and so she can see how much she still owes. She just made her second payment yesterday and is halfway to owning her toy.

Sunday is pay day here at our house. The kids both dump out their coins and can group them into dollars that can be exchanged for paper dollars. It's good to see them look for different coin combinations to make their dollars.

Oh... totally forgot to mention that as they complete their chores I drop the proper coin payments into their jars that sit on the counter by the "Help Wanted" board. They will count up their money in their jars multiple times a week.

I'm pretty pleased with this experiment so far. I'm hoping that we can add to it as we get further into it... adding things like savings and earning interest. But for now we're just taking it slow... one step at a time.

math doesn't wait for monday

Yesterday while cleaning out a closet where I keep a bunch of homeschooling supplies (we're getting ready to do a big room switcharoo) Alex found these little boxes I had bought at Target back in September. They are little geometry boxes with a compass, protractor, ruler and such inside. I had bought them because they were cheap and I might need them someday. :-)

Anyway... Alex found the box and took a look inside. He was pretty intrigued by what he saw. He wanted to know what everything was and what they were for. Here I began to struggle...

2008 Me: Those are really cool geometry tools Alex. Give me some time and I'll pull some stuff together and we'll do a little unit on them this next week.

2009 Me: Here, let me tell you what they are and what they're used for. And by the way, see that K'NEX Geometry Set on the shelf? You can get that out too.


Which one do you think won out?

I stuck to my new plan, but let me tell you that it was both sooo hard and extremely easy at the same time.
The Hard Part:
It killed me to not have prepared for this. My fingers were itching... I could see the teacher's manual CD in the K'nex kit materials and it was all I could do to keep from telling him to stop everything until I could go upstairs and print stuff off. I kept seeing all we "could" do with this if I just could prepare. I eventually had to walk away.

The Easy Part:
We sprawled out in the floor together and I showed him how to make a circle with the compass and how to measure and draw angles with the protractor. No frills... nice and simple. He then got out the K'nex kit and I walked away. He came running upstairs a while later to show me what he had been doing. Using K'nex, he had made a line, line segment and a ray. He had also made various angles out of K'nex, traced them onto his paper (ack! one angle per sheet of paper... but I let that slide) and then measured them. From there we had a little discussion about acute, right and obtuse angles. We also talked about what is meant by at 180 degree turn and a 360 degree turn. He was excited and engaged! He learned more about geometry in that half and hour than he would have if I would gone the 2008 route (because, let's be honest, something else would have come up and I wouldn't have gotten around to planning the little lesson I promised).

Shortly after this, he abandoned the whole pile of stuff and was off playing with Clara. It was all he personally needed to know at that moment so he was done. Even if I would have gotten my act together, there's a really good chance his enthusiasm for geometry would have waned by the time we worked on it "during school". I might have prepared more (notice I said "might") but he wouldn't necessarily have gotten more out of it.

someone needs to stop me

I've developed an addiction to CurrClick.com... sigh.

I first found them over a year ago while out looking for free lapbooks.  I have since figured out that my kids don't really enjoy lapbooks (oh... they enjoy the idea of lapbooks but the actual making of the lapbook... not so much).  

So, started poking around on their site to see what else they offered.... which, come to find out, is a lot.  

I usually love having the actual book in hand to look at.... but I'm beginning to be very fond of ebooks.  

First of all, I can just print pages as I need them versus having to photocopy them.  We do have one of those 4-in-one deals downstairs but it's slow and goes through ink rather quickly.  The printer that is hooked up to my computer is faster and the toner cartridges last longer (plus we were given several extra cartridges by a neighbor who no longer had a printer they would work in).

Second, the above makes ebooks very handy when you have more than one child.  

And third, the store is open 24/7 and you get your product immediately! That's probably the biggest perk for me (and my biggest downfall... lol).  I decide we *need* something, I look on CurrClick, order it, print and I'm using it within 15 minutes.

Here are a few of my recent purchases...

Daily Language Review Grade 1

This was purchased for Clara.  We've been using it for two weeks now and she's enjoying it.  Since we're not doing a formal language arts program with her, this becomes a daily mini-lesson for her.  

25 Prewriting Graphic Organizers and Planning Sheets

I downloaded this for Alex the other day.  I am having him write more.  He's writing narrations and other small stuff weekly but occasionally I have him write longer pieces.  I print off the appropriate organizer for his project and have him use it get himself organized before he starts writing.  So far so good with this one.  I have a feeling that we'll be using it for years to come.

Scholastic Daily Word Ladders Grades 2-3

Total impulse buy for Alex.  It has been a HUGE hit though!  He so looks forward to doing these daily.  I'm not sure if it's doing anything earth-shattering for his spelling and/or vocabulary.... but it's fun, he enjoys it and it can't hurt, can it?

Daily Paragraph Editing Grade 2

I've mentioned this one before.  Alex has been doing these since the beginning of the school year and loving them.  We had been just doing the daily paragraph editing from the book four days a week.  The fifth day is a little writing assignment.  I had been ignoring that because... well... just because.  Lately we've been adding it in and it's been really nice.  The assignments are quick and relate to the paragraphs Alex had been editing all week.  Just an easy way to add more writing to our school.

I also downloaded a spellling program for Clara the other day.  However, there were some issues with the download so I won't mention it here until they get the kinks worked out.  CurrClick's customer service was quick and efficient with dealing with the issue... now we're just waiting on the manufacturer to figure it out.

Now, today I was on their site and saw this...

Math Mammoth Geometry 1

It has intrigued me.  Does anyone have any experience with it?  I'm thinking about getting it to use with this...

K'NEX Education: Elementary Math and Geometry

...that I have sitting around on my "math" shelf downstairs.  The price is right so I might have to go for it.  I'll let you know what I think of it if I do and I would love to hear from any of you who might have used it!

mealtime mental math

Who knew it would be this fun?  :-)

Seriously, so many things that work well with our homeschooling were really not my idea at all.  Okay... maybe at first it was my idea.... or at least my excuse to buy yet another book.... but how some of these things have been used (successfully) rarely comes directly from me.

For example... mental math.  I liked the sound of it when reading the posts to the living math yahoo group.  A special book that people buy to use for mental math?  Sure... let me add one to my cart.  Ohhh... it's a little vintage looking book with a copyright date of 1877?  Let me hit "buy" right now!

Then it came... I looked at it... it was adorable (still is actually)... but what to do with it.  So, I added it to my shelf labeled "math" back in August and never touched it again until this week.

I'm really not sure what made me get this book out... oh, I know.  The other night the kids (wait, it was just Alex the night Clara had dinner at her friend's house... I think... sad that I can't remember two days ago) wanted to show off their math around dinner time.  My brain was shutting down (much like now apparently) and I couldn't think up questions fast enough.  So, I ran down and picked up this book...

Ray's new primary arithmetic

Alex and I did a few and then I got busy doing something else.  Last night they wanted to show off for their dad at dinner so I got out the book again.  They wouldn't let me put it down!  We had such a good time at dinner last night doing problems from this book.  The book is not difficult math... honestly, Alex is doing harder stuff in his regular curriculum BUT it was a challenge to him because he had to do it mentally.  The first thing he did was grab a pencil and start writing on his napkin.  But I asked him to try doing it in his head instead.  They both really got into it and kept begging for more.  To stay sane, we went back and forth between the two so one wasn't yelling over the other one (I did this for Clara's sake, but I was surprised how she was getting some of the addition ones faster than Alex before we started taking turns).  Eventually I ended up asking Clara questions from the addition section and Alex from the multiplication (with addition and subtraction thrown in occasionally  for fun).

A lot of the book is words problems... but they're pretty uncomplicated word problems that are easy to keep track of in your head.  The book was written in 1877 so the problems have to do with marbles, carriages, spools of thread and buying yards of calico.  

It's shocking to me how much they enjoyed this.  They grumbled at breakfast and lunch today because I told them that we would wait to do the book again at dinner.  Clara has been bouncing around saying that she can't wait until dinner because she's hungry AND because we get to do math again.  

It's really crazy.... but a very good crazy!  :-)

a book list for Clara

FYI: This is the first a several posts I'm working on about the changes in our "school" so far this school year... not terribly interesting reading, but I needed to document our changes since my blog seems to be where I do most of my planning record keeping. :-)

Clara is in first grade this year. My plan was rather light for her, as I felt it should be for her first grade year (well, at least compared with Alex's plan for this year). However, she has insisted on keeping pace with the amount of work I'm assigning to Alex. One thing she was adamant about was that she wanted a book list like Alex's Ambleside list. See, I had been typing each week up for him and having him manage his own reading schedule for the week. His Ambleside time was after our seat work was done and while I was fixing lunch. Clara was not content to do free reading while he worked on this, she wanted her own list.

I wasn't sure where to start. So, I ended up on Amazon in listmania and found the following lists to get me started...

Ambleside Yr 0 Fall Books List 1
Ambleside Year 0 Fall Books List 2

Next trip to the library, I located several of the books from these lists that I thought were readable for Clara (thankfully, she's a stronger reader than Alex was at this age) and supplemented them with some readers from the seasonal shelf.

Oh, and I also added a couple level 1 math readers from the Mathstart Series.

That was great, but she finished that week's list in TWO days!!! And she also specifically requested some stories to listen to on my iPod like Alex has. So, back to checking out books and looking through Librivox.

My list for her now consists of this basic formula:

Math Readers
Seasonal Books
Ready for Chapter Books Readers assigned by Chapter
A Science Related Book on iPod
A Story Book on iPod
Poetry Book assigned by poem

She is currently really enjoying having her own list and has surprised me with what she has picked up from her reading (and listening). And the thing is... this is all bonus as far as school is concerned. I had planned on this just being free reading time, but instead she's added more math, science, history, etc. to her school schedule! You've got to love it when things work out this way. :-)

So, I think we've finally hit the right number of books for Clara to comfortably read a week during our reading time.

Here's her list for this week...

Math Readers:
Circus Shapes (MathStart 1)
Mighty Maddie (MathStart 1)
Addition Annie (Rookie Readers)

Seasonal Books:
The Best Fall of All
DK Readers: The Secret Life of Trees (Level 2)
Johnny Appleseed (Ready-to-Read. Level 1)
Leaf Jumpers
Autumn Leaves

Henry and Mudge Under the Yellow Moon:
Together in the Fall
Under the Yellow Moon
Thanksgiving Guest

Reading Rainbow Readers: Scary Stories to Read When it's Dark (Reading Rainbow):
Henry's Bedtime Story
Bloody Fingers
Something at the Window

Wild Life in Woods and Fields (iPod):
Peter's Cat
The Greedy Stranger
The Mole and His Home

Birds of the Air (iPod):
Birds' Eggs
Baby Birds
Birds Feeding their Young

The House at Pooh Corner (iPod):
Side 1
Side 2
Side 3
Side 4

Where the Sidewalk Ends:
Flag
Colors
The Loser
Joey
Listen to the Mustn'ts
Jimmy Jet and His TV Set

Okay... enough rambling about this... we're off to swimming and then I'll ramble on about something else! :-)

couch schooling

I knew it was bound to happen. Alex had it, Jeff had it.... I wanted to hope, but I knew Clara and I would have to have it at some point. Well... the stomach bug finally caught up to Clara and I on Sunday. Clara got it around 3 am and I got it that afternoon. Clara had completely bounced back from it by yesterday morning, but I was not so lucky.

So, my day was spent "couch schooling" :-)

Thankfully we have a routine for our core items and the kids work very independently. They would do their work and bring it to me to look over... and when they did they would throw a couple more saltines in my bowl or refill my ginger ale (they were being very sweet yesterday).

After lunch, they asked if they could hang out with me and watch school movies. Well... since it didn't involve me leaving the couch... why not? :-)

So, we finally sat down to watch this movie...

The Story of 1

I had requested it from Netflix about a month ago and we had just never sat down to watch it. It was recommended in the parents' resource section of the Living Math lesson plan I had purchased. I was afraid that it would be boring for the kids and over their heads. I'm so glad we watched it! I'm not saying that the kids got it all... but they got a lot out of it and it was very entertaining! I learned a lot about the history of numbers from this DVD. I learned math in school... but I don't remember learning anything about where numbers came from and how counting began. It's been fascinating.

After that we watched a couple of Magic School Bus shows that we had recorded.

It was nice to know that we could get so much accomplished without me ever leaving the couch. Thankfully, I'm feeling much better today so we're back to a regular school day today!

sunflowers and sequences

Our sketchbooks finally arrived on Wednesday, so we were ready to start our nature study! I'm very excited about taking on a nature study here in the city. It will be a challenge and I think that's part of the fun... we'll be discovering new parts of the city with each outing!

Today we started our first challenge from the Handbook of Nature Study blog. I had planned all along to just start at challenge #1, but when I saw the latest challenge, I decided that we would do that one first. It was the Sunflower challenge.

We started by reading a bit in this book...

Handbook of Nature Study

Then, because I had just picked up a bunch of living math books from the library, I decided to throw a little math into our study. Thursday night I had been skimming this book...
Go Figure! A Totally Cool Book About Numbers

and came across the section about the Fibonacci Sequence and it's occurrence in nature. Given that the numbers of the spirals of florets are Fibonacci numbers, I thought it worked to add this in. We also read that the number of petals in a flower is often a number from the Fibonacci sequence. So we decided to take a peek at many of the other flowers we passed.

Here the kids are counting petals...
The impatiens had 5 petals... a Fibonacci number.

Alex counted the petals on this flower on this tree...
five petals again...
Then we arrived at the sunflower patch around the corner.

It was cool to see the spirals on this one...
This one was a bit droopy, so Alex held it up for me to photograph it...
and then I held it up for them so they could get a better look.

There was a flower bed there too so we couldn't help ourselves but to start counting petals again.

This one...
... had 34 petals, another number from the Fibonacci Sequence.

This one...
... had 8, yes, another Fibonacci number!

It's oddly addicting to keep counting flower petals. At first I was sad that we didn't read about this during the summer when everything was in full bloom... but then I realized that we would never make it anywhere because we would be constantly counting petals. (I did stop twice to count petals on our way home from dinner.)

It was raining the whole time we were out, so we didn't last too long.

When we got home, I got out their new sketchbooks and let them draw whatever they wanted from our walk.

This is Clara's...
and this is Alex's...
(he was much more enthralled with counting the petals on these flowers than he was with the sunflowers... sigh)

To begin with, I'm not requiring anything when it comes to their journals. I just want them to enjoy doing them and the rest will come eventually. :-)

I think we'll do a bit more work with sunflowers next week... but I wanted to get started before the flowers around the corner were gone.