Math Plans for 2014/2015

First Grade Math

I've tried everything I can think of for math with Lydia, but it just hasn't been sinking in.  All my dreams of creative and alternative math methods have been thrown out the window with her.  I don't think it is a maturity thing either, I think it is just the way she is.  She just hasn't been getting it.  So for this year, I decided to go with the best, most thorough and incrimental traditional math program I could find: Saxon math.

When I first started looking into homeschooling, Saxon was one of the first math programs I heard about and I immediately dismissed it.  I consider myself fairly mathy and some of the other math programs appealed to me much more (Singapore, Hungarian, Miquon, Living Math).  I was sure I could make those work for my children.  But they just aren't, at least for Lydia.  Algorithms are what Lydia needs.  A deep understanding of number relationships is not.  Repitition and memorization are what she needs.  Spiral (constantly reviewing past concepts) and infuriatingly incremental are what she needs, so we're going with Saxon.

Honestly, it is a very respected, proven program that thousands of children have used with great success, but I am a little disappointed to go there.  Also, it is crazy involved!  I have a HUGE teacher's manual (like several inches thick) that is scripted (which I actually like).  I have two workbooks, a "meeting" book, and several masters.  Not to mention the tons of manipulatives that they require (which I mostly had on hand already).  Math is probably going to take us an hour or more a day.  But I am committed.  I am hopeful.  I really think this might work for her, and if it does, we are in it for the long haul, at least with Lydia.

I will not be supplementing Saxon at all this year, at least in the foreseeable future.  It is already so involved that I don't think I'll be up to it!

PreK

For Eleanor this year we will be finishing Essential Math.  She is already on about page 100 in Essential Math A and will probably finish it up in the month.  Essential Math B, from what I learned with Lydia, is much more challenging and I'm sure she'll need to slow down.  I also plan on trying all my beautiful math dreams out on her.  We'll be doing a lot of work with our cuisenaire rods and probably working through Miquon and possibly even starting Math Mammoth if she gets there.  Eleanor is very bright, but she is still very young (almost 4 years old), so we'll take our time and see what happens.

She will also be sitting in a lot on the verbal stuff I do with Lydia, like skip counting and counting backwards, as well as calendar and patterns, so I expect Saxon to benefit her too, somewhat.

Weekly Report: Week 34

I haven't written up a weekly report in the last little bit because we took an unscheduled break off of school.  I just wasn't feeling like doing it for a little over a week, and since we are ahead in our schedule, we didn't!  In that time, we did do about a week's worth of school days, though, so I'm going to say we finished week 34, even though it was spread over a few weeks.

Eleanor at the lake.

We went to Lake Wedington and had a picnic and played in the sand.  The girls recently watched an episode of Daniel Tiger where he played in a sandbox and they wanted to play in a sandbox too.  There are sand-filled volleyball courts at the lake, so they played there for over an hour and then we hiked a bit.

Adelaide missed out on the sandbox but had fun on the blanket with me.

Lazy mom + picnic = Lunchables

We also got to go to Little Sprouts one time.  The other week got rained out.  But the Wednesday we went was fun because they had a farmer plow a pumpkin patch that the kids are going to plant in a few weeks and we got to watch.  Here's a picture of it from Little Sprouts' Facebook page.  I'm borrowing their picture because it is pretty difficult to wrestle my three and take pictures at the same time. :)

Adelaide reached a major milestone in the last week or two.  She is officially walking!  It's about time as she is over a year old.  Right now she walks about 50% of the time and crawls the other 50%, but that percentage is going up every day.  Give her another month and she'll be a pro.

As for actual schooling subjects...

Reading:
Lydia continues to progress and is completely understanding the concept of silent "e" with long vowels.  Right now we're just going through and practicing the sentences.  She is still a very slow reader and has difficulty focusing, so it usually takes us 2 days or more to get through a lesson.

Math:
For the last several math lessons, we've been doing lessons of my own creation.  It is pretty much the same every day.  We started out spending a lot of time building "stairs" with the rods all the way to twenty.

This is a picture from earlier in the year, but we're doing the same thing.

 My hope was that by doing this over and over again, she would start to internalize 10 & 2 make 12 and 10 & 10 make twenty.  And it is working!  She has gotten much, much faster at creating the 1-20 stairs with the rods and she doesn't even need to see the number anymore.  When she is done, we "climb" the stairs and then go "down" the stairs, which helps her practice counting forwards and backwards.  Then we climb the stairs 2 at a time, which practices counting by twos.  Next week we'll climb the stairs starting in the middle, which should help her with "counting on."

I also made a playlist on YouTube of several math songs that count in different ways and we listen/ watch them regularly on our Roku.  These seem to be helping, especially with the skip counting. 

Today I took out the abacus for the first time in a while and when I explained that each row was 10, she was able to quickly tell me what the teen numbers were, and then helped me count by 2s to 20 and 10s to 100.  I'm glad we've been taking this break and think we'll keep it up for a while until she solidly understands all the concepts I'm hoping to help her with.

Handwriting:
She is zooming through HWT Kindergarten.  All the practice on the iPad with LetterSchool has really helped her take off with it.  We usually do 4 or 5 pages at a time when we practice and she does well with them and is retaining them.  We'll probably finish up the book pretty early in Kindergarten.

Spelling:
I am loving All About Spelling.  It is working brilliantly for my daughter and I am enjoying teaching it.  We are almost done with Step 5.

Memorization:
Lydia is a little more than halfway done with "Sweet and Low," which is the longest poem we've worked on (16 lines!).  She likes this one because I've sort of acted it out as we practice, so she does too.  I'll have to try to incorporate more of that into our memorization.  We also continue to review all her previous memorization on a regular basis, and she has retained everything so far.

Math Plans for 3-year old PreK

Ellie will be three years old this next school year and she is already insisting on being included in school plans.  So far I've been able to appease her by printing off pre-writing sheets and having her do "reading" apps on the iPad and call it reading.  I have a feeling she's going to wise up pretty soon and want something more legitimate.  This post is focused on her math.

My plan with Eleanor is to do the Mathematics Enhancement Programme Reception level, also known as MEP Reception.  I attempted to do this program with Lydia, but it was just too verbal for her.  Eleanor shouldn't have any problem with the verbal aspect of the program and it should be right up her alley. 

MEP is a British program based on a Hungarian series.  It focuses a lot on problem solving skills and games.  While meant for a classroom, it does transition to homeschool quite well and is available completely online for free.  The Reception level is only 60 lessons long, so that should give us plenty of time for pausing and working on specific concepts.

We'll also start some C-rod activities.  For now, we will mostly focus on familiarity with them and might start some simple Education Unboxed games or Miquon Orange lab pages.  I did go ahead and buy her the Essential Math A&B workbooks, but I doubt we'll start them this year.  If we do, it will be more towards the end of the year.

School this year is still 100% optional for Eleanor, so all of these plans mostly for fun for her.

Math plans for Kindergarten 2013/2014

Edited: I think we'll begin with this now.  As we get to the end of Essential Math B, I'm finding that I'm dragging her along and that she is just getting frustrated and not really absorbing all that much.  So I think I'll start with this plan as of tomorrow.

I've been putting a lot of thought into what we should do for Kindergarten math next year.  Lydia will be done, or almost done with the Singapore Essential Math program by then, and originally my plan was to move on into Math Mammoth 1a, which is technically a first grade program.  However, I'm finding that she is only absorbing about 50% of the concepts that I'm teaching her and I feel like there would be some great value in stepping back and solidifying her number sense before moving on.  Because she's only be barely 5, I think that now is a great time to pause and really get these concepts down solid.

How to approach this, however, is a little more complicated.  I've thought that maybe we should stick with doing Miquon Orange/Red as our primary math program.  I've also thought about just using a list of concepts and teaching them myself in whatever way makes sense.  I do feel very comfortable teaching at this level, and the latter is a tempting solution.

So after thinking about it, I think we'll do a combination of things.  I plan on using Kitchen Table Math as a sort of guide or check list to make sure she is honestly grasping what I'm talking about.  Rather than worksheets or lesson plans, the book lists the incremintal steps that a child should learn about numbers.  For each little step, it gives some suggestions or ideas on how to teach it.  Up until now, I've mostly been using it as a backup for more ideas if Lydia got stuck somewhere, but I think it will be a great program to follow on its own.

Along with Kitchen Table Math, I plan on using some of the ideas from Education Unboxed.  EU is similar to KTM in that it doesn't have worksheets or lesson plans, but is concept focused.  It is a website with videos of how to use Cuisenaire Rods to teach various math concepts.  We love c-rods at our house, so this is a great resource.

I do plan on continuing with Miquon Orange/Red as I feel like.  Knowing me, it is going to be difficult to not try to finish the program, but as of right now, it is definitely secondary.

Some of the concepts that I am going to focus on with Lydia for Kindergarten are:

• counting to 100
• skip counting by 2s, 5s, 10s
• place value to 10s, maybe 100s
• counting "on" (I say 5, she says 6, 7, 8...)
• counting "back" (I say 5, she says 4, 3, 2...)
• greater than/less than, more/less, bigger/smaller
• ordering things by size
• patterns

That list isn't exhaustive, but if she can get there, we'll move on to more formal math, like Math Mammoth and Miquon.  I'm just not sure she's ready yet.