Lego math - squared and cubed numbers

We looked at cubed numbers this week (following on from our previous work on squared numbers)

After a discussion of the maths, they had to represent some cubed numbers with Lego.

 We followed this with a quick card game,

they had two ways to use this - first turning over a card and 'making' it with Lego (I mixed squared and cubed together as a bit of a test)

and second - to match the card with it's mathematical explanation.

Converting practical life to real life

One of my goals this year was to get the girls cooking dinners on a regular basis. I came up with a plan that each Monday a different girl would cook.

I was worried how Rose would handle this - she is the youngest at 5. But I was relieved to discover that those practical life lesson have paid off.

She happily made us fishcakes for dinner tonight. She started by mixing some left over mash potato, some frozen peas and a can of tuna (salmon also works really well) in a bowl.

Then shaping into rounds.

I supervised her gently heating them.

Before she served them to us for dinner.

Japanese day

We had a day all about Japan at our local Home Ed group this week.

We learnt about New Year traditions including making an Ema (a wooden tablet with prayer or wish for the year on),

practised origami,

made sushi,

learnt about Buddhist pagodas,

did manga drawing,

made votive dolls for girls day and carp streamers for boys day (both occurring later in the year),

looked at Mount Fuji

and made sand volcano's.

Kids love this math

What if I told you their was a math programme out there that your kids would beg to do and they would be reading / playing it in their spare time?

In my December post I talked about using living math and this prompted a number of emails about what it is and how I use it.

Living math it about making math real and understandable, not memorising and following rules without any understanding of why they work. Its more of a holistic approach - all about bringing math into context, math that is understandable and has relevance to life.

To be honest I do still use a curriculum for math (more to reassure myself that we are covering all the basics) but we tend to only use it twice a week - not daily (and yes, they still moan about doing this), the rest of the week focuses on living math books, using math in real life situations and games. 

We have managed to avoid drills and worksheets by memorising math facts using games, stories and songs. For example, their multiplication tables were learnt by singing along to Percy Parker, reading the 'memorize in minutes' stories and playing multiplication war - imagine playing cards with sums written on them, each player lays down a card and calls out the answer to their sum, the highest number takes all the cards played and you move on to the next round. The winner is the player with the most cards at the end. (this also translates well for addition war and subtraction war - there is even an 'area war' version on pinterest )

Don't let the idea of living math scare you, Its really easy to start - just introduce a couple of books or games each week, read some math history or get them to start estimating the spend at the shops. This Living Math site has an amazing list of books - listed by age and topic. They also have links to a discussion forum as well.

For us living math has become an exciting way to learn, it has generated a love of math and given them a real understanding and retention of the math discovered this way.

The great news - the girls don't even consider these as lessons (there are no more moans about doing this math) and they often request living math books during our read aloud times or I find them curled up on the couch reading it - their favourites being 'The house that math built', 'Maths doesn't suck', 'life of fred' and ''What's your angle Pythagoras'.

I've even seen the girls playing 'storm the castle' or 'addition war' on a Saturday : )

How do you school multiple ages at the same time?

This is something I am emailed about a lot.

To be honest it mostly comes down to planning (hence our set school times) and making sure that each child gets some one on one time for the topic they are struggling with. For example - I might be working one on one with Rose on her letter and phonetic reading while the older two (Lilly and Sunflower) are researching and writing up some history work and Tulip is doing copy work. Or while Lilly is working on a new math topic, Sunflower and Tulip will be working on their geography maps while Rose does letter tracing.

I also rely on the girls teaching each other - this is a good way for the older girls to prove they understand a topic by sharing their knowledge with one of their sisters (and a nice way of freeing me up for some one on one time where needed)

The other lifesaver for me is joint lessons - where possible I use joint lessons so all the girls will sit together to discuss, read and narrate then be sent off to do some individual work/research based on what we've just learnt - science, history, geography and even math all lend themselves to this format in our house.

Science is a easy example - when I did the life cycle of stars presentation we all sat together,
did the activity together, discussed it together, then they split off to do some individual work on it which consisted of the older girls writing (in their own words) in their science journals and the younger ones working with the 3 part cards, stamps and star crafts.

Or when we did the human body, after the activity Lilly and Sunflower drew and labelled diagrams while Tulip did a body system puzzle.

History usually involves reading about it together, individual narration (they either tell me in their own words what we've just read or answer questions on what we studied) and then, depending on age, write it up or do a craft/draw a picture.

Geography also works well as a joint lesson - we study the country together then they split with the older girls doing some more research about life in that country while the younger ones trace a map of the country or draw the flag etc.

Math is a great example - when we studied square numbers together the oldest 3 each drew diagrams or suck square stickers to represent them while Rose went off to the kitchen and used Shreddies (a square shaped breakfast cereal) to match the square numbers.

The joy of joint lessons for me is the way they all grasp the knowledge better when working together - Rose was 3 1/2 when we did the life cycle of a star lesson but she wanted to know more about it than her bigger sisters did and we ended up reading star and space books to her for weeks.