Homeschooling Math: Glad we found Fred!

I haven't had much time for blogging lately, but wanted to post about a math series we love.  A friend who is a homeschooling pro recommended it and let us borrow her book for a little while until we get our own.  Have you heard of Life of Fred?  It's a fun little set of books that go from kindergarten to calculus and teach children math through stories.  Fred is a 5-year-old math teacher at KITTENS University.  In Fred's daily life, situations come up which show why certain math skills are important and relevant before asking children to learn them.  For instance, it is 5:00 AM and Fred wants to go jogging, but he thinks he will wait two hours until it is 7:00 AM and no longer dark outside.  5+2=7.  We just finished chapter four in the first book, Apples, and Suzi and I both love Fred.  She really relates to this strange math teacher child who sleeps under his desk and has a doll named Kingie!

Suzi isn't quite ready to answer the end-of-chapter questions on her own yet, and I don't want to push her too hard, so I help her answer the hard ones.  If it gets too frustrating for her, we'll take a few weeks out and come back to it later.  As a child who felt crushed under rows and rows of repetitive math problems, I'm so happy to have found something totally different for Suzi.  I'm even thinking of trying out the higher-level Fred books for myself.  They aren't even expensive!

As for our general homeschooling progress, I do have some pictures, but I don't have much time to upload them right now.  We are swiftly approaching day 90, which is the halfway point of our 180-day school year and time to fill out forms and send in a mid-year checklist to our accountability association.  I'm oddly excited about it, maybe because it's the first official thing we'll have to do besides joining.  Our schedule has been fluctuating due to holiday events and activities, but we'll almost certainly be halfway done by Christmas.  Instead of taking a long Christmas break, I think we'll take advantage of Daddy being home to help with the little ones and keep on schooling.

Well, naptime is probably almost over around here.  I hope to have some pictures up soon!

Rolling coins for math

This was a late August homeschool lesson, but I've had so little time for blogging that I am just getting to post about it now! And only if the baby sleeps a few more minutes!

The pink dinosaur bank and a jar or two were getting pretty full, so I thought it'd be fun to roll coins and do a little math in the process. We got all our coins, a few colored bowls, and some wrappers out and got to work. I let the kids sort the coins. I really just grabbed some plastic bowls from the kitchen without thinking, but the different colors came in handy. I could tell Ivey, "that's a quarter; it goes in the pink bowl." The lengthy coin sorting process allowed for lots of hands-on discussion and practice identifying coins. Does it have ridges? Then it's worth more. If someone said they'd trade you their penny for your dime, would that be a good deal?

I did most of the counting and rolling, but while I did it I took the opportunity to show the girls skip counting--mostly by twos with the pennies and tens with the dimes. Skip counting is something I had a hard time grasping as a child, and I think I might continue to get the coin jar out whenever we work on it. Money serves as a manipulative to let you put your hands on skip counting and helps bring it into the real world.

Once all the coins were rolled, I let the girls feel how heavy they all were. It was hard to hold that bowl up, but Ivey is strong!

Then we visited the bank. Now, I realize you can take all your coins to a machine in the grocery store that will do everything I just talked about and spit the cash out into your hand within a couple of minutes. But then you would miss out on the money lesson. So we went to the bank with our heavy bowl of coins and turned it in for some paper money, which was much lighter! I think Jordan might have been a little embarrassed to have his picture taken in the bank!

Finally, we went shopping. We bought movies to watch together and other fun stuff, and let the girls "pay the lady." When I was little, my parents helped me roll coins so I'd have money to spend when we went on vacation. I remember rolling coins for Disney World! But we are not going to Disney World until Robert is old enough to enjoy himself, so we figured for this roll-up, we might as well have a little fun right now!

Now the dinosaur bank is hungry, but he'll be full again before too long. Maybe next time we will be rolling coins for Disney World. I hope so!

Counting by fives

Because Suzi had a birthday last week, she received several cards with $5 bills in them. She was so excited. Of course, she wanted to count her money. This led us to try counting by fives. I hadn't intended to start that quite yet, but for counting money it definitely comes in handy!

I remember having the hardest time counting by fives as a child. The only instruction I recall getting was rote memorization and calling out the numbers as a class. There may have been some sort of manipulative used, but I do not remember it. We were probably given worksheets for it, but those were torture for me as I couldn't finish them fast enough, couldn't focus, and was kept in from recess to work on them. Anyway, during skip counting I was lost in a sea of chanting children. I needed a visual or some sort of way to tangibly connect counting by fives to something familiar. When I forgot which number was next I was totally stuck, until one day my brother's girlfriend told me that if I got confused I could just count five up to the next number. It literally hadn't occurred to me!

I told Suzi to hold her hand up and count on her fingers. Starting with her thumb, I told her to whisper "1, 2, 3, 4," and then when she got to her pinky finger to yell "5!!!" Suzi loves yelling. Then we started back at her thumb and counted "6, 7, 8, 9... 10!!!" We continued to about 30. Then we did a little dance and counted rhythmically by fives up to 30 or so. Memorizing things this way is fine, but some kids (like me when I was little) need to have this information anchored in a meaningful way to something they already get, in a way that is agreeable with their learning style. We will also use our little number chart that I colored for skip counting. I colored the fives and tens in red. That way, Suzi can count just the reds and she will be counting by fives. It's already been a helpful visual aid for counting by tens.

I found this neat website called IXL the other day. It has all kinds of interactive online games for teaching math skills (and other subjects as well). Check out their problems for counting by fives! You don't have to pay to play the games, but if you buy a membership you get access to more features. I am seriously considering it, but there are just too many fun things to buy! Homeschooling can get expensive fast.

If you have already started skip counting, how did your child understand it best?