...And the New Year Begins

We've settled back into a nice rhythm for school since taking some time off around the holidays. I think we were all ready to get back to a regular routine. It was definitely good to have a few weeks to read as much as I wanted and for the girls to play as much as they wanted. I feel like all three of us have renewed creativity and excitement to learn again.

Sophie wants to do her "math facts" every day...which currently means learning to write her numbers.

We count random stuff all the time, and she counts to about 20 independently now. I am reading a book called "Dr. Wright's Kitchen Table Math", which has ways to integrate math into every day activities for ages 2-8. It's a little dry when "Divergent" is calling to me from the next room, but back to school, right? :)

Delaney is on her fifteenth math facts set, working hard to learn all her addition facts. I try to mix it up a little. Sometimes she writes the answers, some days she tells me the answers, some days she uses the Mathtopia app to practice instead.

Delaney is still enjoying Dreambox. She is getting much better at the problem solving section, and her favorite game is Frog Race. She is about 1/3 through the second grade section, and she amazes me every day with the concepts she picks up with relative ease.


We've been playing lots of board games...Scrambled States of America, Princess Monopoloy, Connect Four, etc. Delaney used Connect Four to teach Sophie about patterns this week. Big sisters are the best.

 

Delaney continues to learn how to be a chess master with Cullen in the evenings.

I love listening to Sophie's commentary during the games. Last night while "helping" them play, she said, "Wow. Looks like I winning!" and "Aaaargh, don't put me in check!"

Sophie has been practicing initial sound recognition. Her stack of sight words that she knows is getting bigger, and we've started playing with sounding out small words.

Our new year has begun quite nicely, and I am so pleased with my girls and their excitement to learn!

Monster Math

We love to play games around this place, and math games are the best. There are so many ideas and free resources on Pinterest, or through just a plain old Google search that the options are really overwhelming endless.

I found a "Monster Munch" game a few weeks ago, and Delaney and I played with it last week. I adapted it a little bit for her. Instead of using dice, we used playing cards in order to practice with some larger numbers. We also did addition instead of subtraction, and pretended we were feeding the hungry monster, adding up how many treats we gave him. We took turns drawing two cards and "feeding" them to our monster, then Delaney had to write the addition problem on the whiteboard (or paper, later, when Sophie took over the whiteboard :) ), and figure out the answer.

 

You can find the printable link to this cute little guy here at http://littlestscholars.blogspot.com

 We all took turns "feeding the monster". Sophie loved pretending he was eating the cards.

This game was definitely a "play again". I might make (or find in my mess of a garage) a set of larger numbers to add 10's, 5's, or numbers up to 100 as we move on in math. This game is adaptable to play with Sophie in all sorts of other ways I can think of too...number recognition, alphabet recognition, etc.

If you are looking for some other ideas, you can find my Homeschool - Math Pinterest board here.

Greater Than, Less Than

We love to play games at our house, and we had a family War tournament a few weeks ago. Delaney really enjoyed it, so Cullen played with her a few more times over the weekend and taught her to say "A is greater than B" for whatever the cards were during each turn.

I took it a little further while we played for our math time this week, and made an "alligator" mouth. I explained that the alligator is only hungry for the biggest number, and also that in official math terms, the alligator is a greater or less than symbol.

Then we played, and she beat my socks off. Again. :)

Getting to make the alligator eat all of the numbers while she told me which number was greater than the other was an added bonus.

 

Delaney has also been working on recognizing all of the numbers through 100. Did you know that information gets to your long term memory better if you learn it while wearing pajamas? If that were true, we would all have fantastic long term memory around here...haha.

Sophie has been enjoying making towers with her pegs lately.

Her favorite part might be knocking them all down when she is finished. I love her face in this picture - so proud of herself!

Halloween Fun!

We have been having lots of fun with some seasonal activities. I dug out my ABC leaves from the Kindergarten bin, and we scattered them all over a table. Delaney matched the "Mommies" and the "Babies".

She would find the missing "baby" and yell for help. "My baby is found! Please help it find its way home!" Then I had to cut all of the pretend branches out of its path so it could safely make it back to its Mommy letter.

There are some amazingly talented moms out there, and I was fortunate enough to find some of their free printables on Pinterest. I downloaded this Pumpkin pack, and this Halloween pack, picked out what I thought Delaney would like the most, printed and laminated. (Did I mention that I got a new toy? A laminator!! Woo Hoo!) I decided to make file folder games with most of the Halloween pack, and put some of the pages in her art bucket for her to find on her own. She found the patterning page and absolutely loved the graphics.

I like the word matching. She had to figure out which word was which based on inital and final sounds. She did very well.

(Is that not the cutest little witch and vampire and Frankenstein you have ever seen??)

Afterwards, she made up a story with the cards...the witch ran around catching everyone and putting spells on them, and trapping them in her haunted house, until the werewolf saved them all from harm.


This kid is going to be a great author some day.

She loved the shadow matching, but she could do it far too quickly, so I changed it up a little bit. I put all of the cards around the folder randomly, and she had to figure out how to move them around so all of the pictures were in the 1st and 3rd rows, and all of the (matching) shadows were in the 2nd & 4th rows. This was more challenging for her.

The pumpkin number order puzzles were fun.

I found some Halloween erasers at Safeway for .99. We used them for sorting and patterning.

We learned about measuring and comparing.

And of course made them all have an awesome Halloween dance party together. I was too busy dancing for pictures. :)

Cereal Math and O'Clocks

We have managed to stick with a consistent school schedule around here lately. It's been great!

Delaney has continued to practice 1:1 correspondence. She can now count out up to 4 objects without help...as in "give me 4 of those" and understanding that she has to do more than count to 4 while giving me a handful. Our current goal is up to 6, and she does this with about 75% accuracy. I think once she gets to 6, the lightbulb will switch on, and she will grasp the concept clearly.

We used flashcards and Kix cereal to practice the other day.

 

 The dots on the cards help her place the right amount of cereal on the cards.

Then we count them, touching each piece as we count.

Sophie was very interested and watched her big sister demonstrate her skills.

We used a plain piece of paper with 6 boxes drawn on it, and numbered each box.

She took some cute bug stickers and we "caught bugs", putting the correct number of bugs in each box, or "bug cage."

I had her trace the numbers as well.

Delaney is also beginning to learn to tell time, and can read the O'clocks independently and 30's with just a little help. We played a game with some little pretend clocks in which I showed her a time and she had to tell me what time it was, and what we do at that time of day, then she got to act it out.

 It's 6:00am! Time to wake up!

It was a lot of fun, and she has an excellent understanding of what we do at various times of day, as well as correctly telling the time.

Sophie enjoyed it too.

I found all of the materials for these activities around the house...paper, stickers, index cards, cereal, and markers. The clocks were in a school bin, but those are pretty easy to find in most toy or learning sections of a store. Honestly, I made up the activities as I went along, knowing what I wanted to teach her, and figuring out which methods were going to work at the time. I knew she would like the Kix activity...food is always a winner. The bug catching began as a simple "trace the number" activity and evolved from there as her attention did not wander and she was willing and interested in counting some more. Our "what time is it" game was Delaney's invention. I had put the clocks in our blue bin for the week, offered her a few examples, and she took the game from there.

Teaching is so easy when your students want to learn! :)

Cupcake Numbers

My little sweetie pie turned 3 last week, so in honor of her birthday, I made a little cupcake counting center.

I used this .pdf I found through a Google search...

http://www.tlsbooks.com/cupcakefun.pdf

Hailey colored the cupcakes for me, then I cut them out. I let Delaney pick which numbers she wanted to use, and pick from an assortment of candles to place the right amount of candles on top of or around the cupcakes.



She is beginning to catch on to 1:1 correspondence, and successfully completed numbers 1-6 without help. I remind her to count from left to right, and touch each candle with her finger as she counts to make it a little easier.


She can count to 15 now, and would previously just count to whatever number she decided to stop on, but during this activity, she actually counted the candles. Yay Delaney!

This activity could be used in many different ways...number order, using cupcakes or candles to sort by color or pattern, making a pattern with the candles or cupcakes, or counting backwards. You could also have your child color the cupcakes in a pattern.You could also color the correct number of dots on the top of the cupcake to correspond with the numbers on the cupcakes. There are lots of different adaptations to work with whatever level your child is at.

The TLS site has a bunch of other free printable activities as well. Bookmark it - it's a great resource!

Valentine Numbers

Delaney is working on recognizing numbers 1-20. Learning with food is always a great time, so for Valentine's Day, we used some heart patterned plates and candy hearts.

The plates are numbered 1-20.

First, she put them in order.

We used 1-5 the first day, then 1-10 on subsequent days, using my approach I talked about with M&M Number Order.

Once she mastered putting the plates in order, we worked on sorting by color. I let her choose which plates to use for which colors, and we put all of the candy on the "0" plate so it wasn't confusing.

The next week, we sorted by color and started some basic graphing strategies. She put the candies in vertical lines beside each other. We talked about more and less, and how we could tell.

Then, we did some patterning with candy.

We may have snacked on a few while we played. Positive reinforcement for a job well done, right?

We used the candy and plates for the entire month of February, and did an activity about 3 or 4 days per week. By the end of the month, Delaney could get the materials and do the activities independently.