Math Thinking
Sean is almost through with Book 6 of Key to Algebra. It is getting to feel like hard work. I remember getting to this point with Brendan when he used the series. I keep telling Sean that it gets to be second nature, factoring and simplifying, just like he can read now without decoding each word painfully. He looks a bit dubious but forges on. I find there are lots of things I accepted as “just the way things are” — like why can’t you cancel out the components of a “phrase” like x-1? So then I show him how to plug in a real number and demonstrate how it wouldn’t work, but it makes me curious about whether there is a philosophical reason behind that.
Kieron got up to “long” division in Saxon. He is so good at mental math that I can let him hack the problem first “tell me how many 5’s in 365″ — and it takes him only a minute or less to come up with the answer. Then I can show him the Saxon way to do it, so he sees there are multiple ways to figure it out and it’s not a mystical process. I encourage him to cross-check this way, having read somewhere that kids who are successful in math thinking usually have multiple strategies for solving problems and can mentally visualize what they are doing with the various mathematical procedures. This is a bit similar to how successful readers operate.
Now WHY he can do this — probably partly inheritance of his Dad’s mathematical mindset, but also, honestly, figuring out how to spend his birthday money and allowance at lego.com or ebay, and also I took a different tack with arithmetic with him than I did with my older set. It was extremely eclectic — I used Miquon and Ray’s Arithmetic with MCP Math and we stayed very lowkey and kept the lessons short.
They both did Latin Quia and a math drill online.
Other Things
I read Kieron 2 more chapters of Jotham’s Journey and Sean read Fabiola. Kieron was interested in the description of how the Essenes at Qumran copied out the Torah one letter at a time. We have been skipping the little “lessons” at the end of each chapter. Sometimes I paraphrase them but most of the time not. Charlotte Mason talked about how children didn’t need things to be spelled out for them, that they were capable of making their own connections. I agree and it accords with my natural distaste for heavyhanded teaching, though sometimes if something resonates with me I might share it with them.
Clare has been listening to Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby (not all at the same time!) and playing Advent music and Broadway musical standards on the keyboard. Right now she’s playing something from Les Miserables.
We had a conversation this morning which included Brendan but now I can’t remember what it was about — I should write it down at the time so these things don’t slip out of my head because I think the conversational times are key to what we’re trying to do.
Also, because it’s Monday we did our weekly house cleaning and had our “free day” when the kids do computer and nintendo games. That means that I didn’t read much to Paddy at all but I got a few other things done that I needed to do around the house, and updated my Advent notebook.
Aidan “read” the Gingerbread Boy to me and even went so far as to improvise his own story changes — as a joke, not because he couldn’t remember the words. Someday I will have to write some of these down since he can be quite creative.
He convinced me to make Rice Krispy squares –a favorite of his, and helped me make dinner — stir fry. He loves the kitchen and I am thinking that since it’s pretty big I could use it a lot more as an educational center for him than I actually do. He would love this, for instance!
Here he is helping me make gingerbread bears for St Nicholas Day.
Picture Schedule
OH! One more thing I have started with Aidan that he just brought to my attention while I was writing this! I made a week’s calendar for him on a piece of posterboard. The context is that every day he asks what we are going to do that day. If he knows something is going to happen soon — like he knows that we are going to pick up his brother Liam at the train station later this week — he asks about it almost hourly. So I think he needs to be able to visualize the course of a week and have been pondering how to make a visual. I finally decided to just keep it simple and functional for now, so I divided the posterboard into seven sections and labelled each with a day of the week. Then next time he “told” me that we were going to see Liam today, I drew pictures for each day of this week and told him what we were going to do that today. “Today is Monday, right here. We’re not going anywhere. Tomorrow is Tuesday. This is our car and here’s your purple wheelchair. That means that tomorrow we’re going to town to visit your PT and then go on a walk down Christmas Tree Lane with your cousins. ” And so on. I asked for his help in drawing the pictures — “what should I draw for when Judy (the OT) comes?” Well, who would have thought — he LOVES this and has brought it to me many many times today: “We’re going to AMTRAK!!” and points to my little drawing of a train. IT completely makes sense to him and gives him a way to organize the future in his brain. It looks so very basic and unartistic that I would blush to upload a picture but I mean to make another one for next week (since I drew all over this week’s one) and either will make a new one weekly OR start doing something a bit more real with Velcro and standard pictorial symbols or something.
