Multiply by Love

19 March 2012

I was up most of the night with stomach cramps. Maybe that dinner wasn't as healthy as I thought! I still don't have any idea what it was that caused the cramping but it is miserable. I still can't move around much without the cramps coming on again. Unfortunately I did need to get out of the house and run a few errands today. Talk about miserable!

The kids were good to me today and cleaned up the house a bit and attempted to load the dishwasher. Ra sat with me on the couch for a while and we did some oral quizzing on multiplication facts. Now mind you I have not done any formal teaching on multiplication, at least not in the same way I did with K12 and adding and subtracting.

We have gone over the basics of multiplication however. The fact that one number is how many are in a group and the other number is how many of those groups there are. I have previously explained to her that any number multiplied by zero is zero. After all if you have no groups of ten you have nothing and if you have ten groups of nothing you still have nothing.

I have also explained to her that knowing her skip counting will help her in all other areas of math. She requested that I begin asking her multiplication questions based in what she already knows of skip counting. She can skip count by 2's, 3's, 5's, 10's and 11's to 100.  I asked her multiplication questions that involve these increments. She did very well! I am so proud of her.

At bed time Ra read Fancy Nancy Pajama Day and I read Stinkers and Stingers.

Cribbage

18 March 2012

Today we attended church, (a little late I admit but we made it!) and spent some time relaxing at home. We had such a busy week last week that we decided to take it easy today. Around 1:00p.m. my mother called and asked her and my father could stop by for a visit. They were up in the area for a missionary farewell for one of my cousins.

The kids were extremely excited as usual when we have company. We live about an hour away from most of our family so we don't get visitors often. The kids had so much fun showing off all they have been doing and learning in our homeschool efforts and Grandma Debbie and Grandpa Mike enjoyed hearing all about it. Ra showed off her skip counting prowess, beautiful cursive and all of the fun crafts we did for the various holidays.

When we were in Hurricane Papa Glen and Nana Lori showed the hubby and I how to play cribbage. It is so chalk full of math that I decided to use it at home. I have heard that card games, dice games and board games are some of the best ways to learn math, so why not give it a try.

I asked my parents if they have ever played cribbage and they said no. So I decided to use that moment to not only show my parents how to play, but Ra as well. Ra loved it and though Grandpa Mike was a little distracted by Puss in Boots on the TV, I think my parents enjoyed it too. Grandpa Mike told me that he is really good at math, something I have probably always taken for granted in my father until now. He said that the only thing that messes him up in math is a calculator! Ha! See! That is how proficient I want my kids to be, and myself of course, because I am no where near that.

After a healthy dinner we read some of the Old Testament Stories before I shooed the kids off to bed.

Notebooking and Numerals

16 February 2012

Being computer day today I spent some time conversing with my mother and my sister and cleaning up the house while the kids played on the computers. After lunch I put on some education flash game sites for the kids. I meander down to see how they were doing about an hour later and found Ca (who is only almost 4 mind you) doing a fractions game! I don't think he knew exactly what he was doing but it was amusing to see how invested he was in it!

Most of my time was spent figuring out my plan of attack for the next little while. I came across Notebooking and Classical method of education and I believe I am going to incorporate each of them as best I can in their own appropriate places. I had already done some Notebooking and so the idea of doing more of it comes natural and is appealing. I was going to teach my kids German as their first foreign language but I have changed my mind and I am now going to do Latin. After all, if they learn Latin well enough most other languages should come easier and it will help the kids know and understand our language better. They will also be able to understand the terminology used in sciences and mathematics.

Towards the end of the day I did a quick lesson using Principles of Numeration: Learning to Think and Self-Govern with Numbers by Glenn and Julianne Kimber. We went over Principle 1 which is "Numbers can be written in more than one way and still have the same meaning." The kids drew examples of this principle in their Notebooking notebooks I had for them already. I went a little further in my explanation of this principle by suggesting that numbers are an idea and the symbols or words we use are simply our way of expressing that idea. Ra caught on to that quickly and told me it is the same way with words. She is a bright cookie! I am going to enjoy teaching her so much.

After our little lesson we read a chapter from Genesis in the KJV Bible and a chapter from The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. It was a good day even if it doesn't look like it was particularly productive.

P.S. Our Jar of Good Works had been added to a little each day! We are keeping on track with it. It was a great way to keep El's spirits up today since he got in trouble and had his computer privledges taken away. I found things for him to do and he found things to do that would earn him beans. Every time I put a bean in the jar for him his face would be bright as the sun! And speaking in similies, we watched a movie on similies yesterday and Ra has been making up her own. For example, she went to brush her teeth and she knew we were waiting for her so we could begin reading and she said, "I'm going to be as fast as a horse!" Kids crack me up! But in all sincerity, she knows what it is and she is using it! That is what makes homeschooling so neat!

Staying Within a Grocery Budget

15 February 2012

My little Ca had an ear ache last night and so I didn't get much sleep which in turn led to a late morning. After breakfast I had Ra help me put together our grocery list. I told her what we needed and she wrote it down. At the grocery store I had Ra write down the cost of each item we were purchasing.

With the produce I explained to her that the price (on most items) is based on pounds. The tomatoes were $0.99 per pound and when we weighed the two tomatoes in our sack it was 1 1/8 lb. I drew a pie for Ra to show her briefly what 1/8 means. We added the $0.99 to the $0.12 (for the 1/8 lb) and come up with $1.11 for the tomatoes. She repeated this exercise with the bananas.

At the eggs I showed Ra that they sold them in increments of 6. They had a half dozen, a dozen and one and a half dozen. I had her divide 12 and 18 by 6 and we found it to be 2 and 3. We then divided the price of the 12 eggs by 2 and the price of the 18 eggs by 3. We came up with prices of $0.99 for the half dozen, $0.74 for the dozen and $0.73 for the one and a half dozen. This wasn't really an exercise we needed to do because I always buy the one and a half dozen because that is how many eggs we use in a week, but it was instructional for Ra and I think she enjoyed it.

Since we bought two loaves of bread and two gallons of milk and two bags of cereal I had her add the price of two together. At the end of our trip the list looked like this:

eggs...........$2.19
bread.........$1.98
milk............$4.58
bananas......$1.65
tomatoes....$1.11
cereal.........$6.74
tortillas.......$0.99
tea...........+ $2.66
                 $21.88


When settled at home again I had Ra write her spelling words two times each. I used the synonyms for "symmetry" for her spelling words this week. Her words are:

equal
symmetry
balance
proportion
unity
consonance
symphony
coherence


I worked on her printing with her a little bit, asking her to focus on making her writing neat and exact. I also needed to remind her several times that it is okay to erase, that is why we write in pencil, so we may be able to fix our mistakes. I also had El practice writing with "A" and "1". After that we watched a few videos from Have Fun Teaching and then watched Donald in Mathmagic Land. I used to watch it a bunch as a kid though I never realized how full of information it is!

I did research on line trying to find some Homeschool Co-ops in my area and found that there was a group meeting in an hour for a once a month get together. I hurried my kids out to the car and called my dad inquiring if he would look after the kids for me. He agreed and I met with the wonderful ladies. They were informative and friendly. I only wished that they were a little closer. They gave me information on how to go about locating the homeschool co-ops that would be in my area. I plan on doing some of that tomorrow as I am falling asleep while typing at the moment I need to go to sleep. Sweet dreams!

Valentine Mathematical Symmetry

11 February 2012

Today we made our Valentine's card. It was a fun and super messy but easy to clean up. I started out with having Ra help me figure out if we had enough paper doilies for how many cards we wanted to make. We wrote a list of all the cousins and friends and grandparents we would be making cards for. We agreed that each cousin would only get one card from all four of the kids, the friends would get one card as well. The grandparents however would get one card from each of the kids that could make them on their own, (leaving Em out of the count). The initial count left us with 32 cousins, 6 friends, and 8 grandparents. So our equation looks something like this (32 + 6) + (8 x 3) = 62 . SIXTY TWO! Boy I sure am glad we aren't adding another 60 cards to that with school classes for Ra and El!

I showed Ra the packages of doilies. I had one package of red, one of white and one of pink. There were 16 doilies per package. I asked her to figure out how many doilies we had to make cards with. She added 16 + 16 + 16 and I explained that this was the same thing as 16 x 3. I then asked her if we had enough doilies to use one for every card. She said no, that 48 < 62. I then had her figure out how many more doilies we would need to be able to have one for each card. With an answer of 14 I asked her how many more packages we would need. She answered with one package. We went to the store to get the last needed package.

Finally beginning, we used construction paper, scissors, glue and the doilies to make the cards. I showed the kids how to make a heart by folding the paper in half and cutting half a heart shape around the fold. I used this as an opportunity to explain symmetry. We had fun coming up with other shapes and patterns to cut out using symmetry.  We made hearts, diamonds, rectangles, accordion people, and flowers just to name a few.

We continued the observation of symmetrical objects into dinner time and I plan on continuing to point it out whenever we see it throughout the year.    

Tonight we read The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett again. And hey, I even got some reading in of Laddie: A True Blue Story by Gene Stratton Porter.

Grocery Store Math

3 February 2012 

This morning I found myself lost on the internet. I was preparing my schedule for next week and decided that I wanted to incorporate some educational flash game sites on the kids "computer days" Tuesday and Thursday. I came across Manga High, a math website where you have to sign up as a school and I registered my "home school" as a school and included on the roster, not only my own kids, but all of my nieces and nephews as well. It took up most of my morning, so I didn't get any reading done before we had to go grocery shopping.

At the grocery store I began asking the kids to locate the name label in the produce department and the prices. Ra asked me why I was getting the brown pears instead of the green pears. I had her show me the different kinds of pears she saw and I helped her read the labels. There were Bartlett pears, D'Anjou pears, and Bosc pears. I had her tell me how much each cost, and which one cost most and which one cost least. I told her that was why we were buying the Bosc pears, because they were the least expensive. While picking out our pasta I had the kids find which brand was on sale and verify that it was the cheapest. Then I had Ra identify the bowtie pasta, El identified the shell pasta and Ca identified the macaroni pasta.

On the cereal isle we looked at the brand of cereal we always buy and the kids know they can pick from the "blue bag" cereals. I showed Ra where the Net Weight was written on the bags and had her compare the weight of the "blue bag" to the "orange bag" cereals. The "blue bag" was 32 oz and the "orange bag" was 39 oz. She told me there was a difference of 7 oz and that it was the "blue bag" that had fewer ounces. I then had her compare the prices. The "blue bag" cereal was $3.88 and the "orange bag" cereal was $6.79. I told her that the "orange bag" cereal was almost two times the price of the "blue bag cereal but it didn't have two times more cereal in the bag, so the "blue bag" cereal was cheaper.

We had a similar exercise when choosing Orange Juice. I started by having them identify the ones which where on sale, then had them choose the cheapest one. It was a Half Gallon for $1.99. I had Ra look at the full Gallon of the same brand to make sure that $1.99 was the best price. I had her round up $1.99 to $2.00 and figure out the cost of buying a gallon's worth of orange juice if we bought them as Half Gallons. The full Gallon orange juice wasn't on sale, but it was $3.49. Ra told me we needed to buy the Gallon orange juice and not the two Half Gallon orange juices, because it would be cheapest.

To summarize, we were at the grocery store for 30 minutes and we went over identification, pricing, grouping, colors, sorting, units of measurement, rounding, and overall I had the best shopping experience with four young kids at the grocery store I could ever have imagined. Next week I will give Ra the grocery list and have her keep track of the prices so we can know how much we will be spending before we check out.

The kids spent the rest of the day with Grandma J who is going to be out of town for a couple weeks. They went to the Aviary and the Recycle center with Grandma and had a fun time. We read for 20 minutes before the kids went to bed and I am planning on getting in a few chapters of Little Britches by Ralph Moody before I call it a night.