I took the spring and summer completely off math hoping to get a better idea of how to do Living Math (HT JoVE at Tricotomania). I wanted to look at how math appeared in our daily lives. So I’m just going to list a few random things that happened:
Paddy counting skittles with one to one correspondence with his fingers. “I have 4 skittles” (holding up four fingers). “Now I have 3.” Etc. Funny how little ones just seem to pick that up by osmosis. I have never, never sat down to teach him this.
Kieron doing cross-corollations between his spending money and what he wants on Ebay. He discovered ebay late this summer and has been actually pretty resourceful and creative in choosing things he wants for the best price. One example — he bought arms and legs for one of his bionicles that had lost those essential appendages. This week he bought a slingshot after hearing his dad talking about them. He has been browsing for wooden swords, recently, but has to wait and save his spare change until he can afford one. Sometimes this motivates him to ask me for jobs so he can get extra money.
Sean asked me how to do averages today. He wants them for his fantasy football league stats, which is how Brendan really mastered percentiles and statistics. Sean did averages back in sixth grade but now he really wants to understand them.
Aidan is still working on one-to-one correspondence with numbers but he is up to counting four. A friend said that she taught counting with Skittles. You could eat as many as you could count. That sounds like it might get him over this little hurdle. If it wasn’t for that gap, and his fine motor difficulties, he would be basically close to first grade level.
Now for the textbook-y math:
Sean is on Key to Algebra. I am going to bring Key to Geometry back in as a supplement/substitute. If he can finish these mostly by the end of the year he will be on a pretty good track. I am going to try to find some creative, not too boring ways to bring in a basic arithmetic review.
This is what I’ve always done with Kieron — used a scope and sequence as a kind of spine and just pulled in different books and resources as needed rather than working strictly from one. A few pages of Miquon here, MCP Math there, Ray’s for mental calculations and story problems, and then of course drill sheets from the internet, some math games both electronic and non-electronic, and various manipulatives. It has been pretty sporadic so this year I want to try to get an idea of where he actually is, since he is 10.
I guess this isn’t totally unschooling but it seems to fit the way we do things. Kieron can add together shipping plus basic price without a problem, and Sean can do some calculations faster than I can.
One thing I am intending to do, whether by blogging or privately, is to keep a sort of journal of their progress in different areas and any issues that come up. In my structured years I found it so disheartening to work from checklists and schedules. Even when I got to check off a lot of page numbers it didn’t seem to have much meaning, for any of us. So this year it would be nice to have some annotations to go along with it, that I can look back at from the point of view of a unique experience, not just another kid working through a math book.
