One of Daegan’s favourite sort of question for our ‘Problem of the Day’ is what I call a “What Number Am I?’” riddle. Here’s some that we’ve done in the past few weeks: All three of my digits are the same. The sum of my digits is 6. I am a 2-digit even number. I [...]
In a previous post I mentioned one of the series of workbooks Daegan has enjoyed the most: Dr. Dooriddles. Here’s a typical riddle from these books, level A2 (grades K-2): I’m found inside pillows, I help keep birds dry; I’m soft to the touch, Birds need me to fly. What am I?____________________________ (answer: feathers) We’ve [...]
Our addition of a “problem of the day” question to our math routine continues to go very well. We had a super discussion about today’s question—the version Daegan created to try to stump Mom required some careful thinking and strategy! Here’s what I put on the board for him, which he immediately took a logical [...]
I’ve mentioned before that Daegan loves puzzles and riddles of all kinds—from Dr. Dooriddles (review forthcoming!) in language arts to kakuro and Math Analogies to chemistry / geography puzzles. They make learning more fun! Both Jim and I were the same way as kids, and as adults we’ve come to believe even more in the [...]
Yesterday the boys and I read the book Grandfather’s Shape Story (Canada) (US) by Brian Sargent, one of the Rookie Read About Math series. In the book, a grandfather tells his granddaughter a story about a man and a special (magical?) rooster, and uses tangram blocks to make pictures to compliment the story as he goes [...]
Over the last while I’ve been feeling like something isn’t quite working in our math curriculum. While we do lots of fun activities in math, we’ve been using Math-U-See as a spine in this area, along with a few other workbooks from the Critical Thinking company. While Daegan LOVED Math-U-See Primer last year, and booted [...]
While not as popular as it’s cousin sudoku at present, kakuro puzzles have been around for years. They are also known by the name “cross sums”, as they are a mathematical version of the crossword puzzle. I remember enjoying them as a kid—and more complicated ones even now as an adult—and thought I’d give it [...]
We played a couple games with popsicle (craft) sticks last night. I got the first game idea from a blog post about making shapes (triangle, square, pentagon, hexagon, etc.) using sticks, but added a little twist of my own to make the game broader. I began giving each boy 1 stick. “What can you make?” [...]
We had a pretty good weekend. My parents were in town for a conference/meeting, and my Dad came for a visit on Saturday afternoon. It had been a while since he’d seen the boys, so it was nice to catch up. Earlier on Saturday the boys each had their drama class as well. This morning [...]
Daegan uses Math U See as the core, or ‘spine’ of his math learning, and we use other books and materials, flashcards, play games, he helps cook, etc. Today we started a new resource, in keeping with my focus on thinking skills: _Math Analogies_ beginner workbook, from the Critical Thinking Company: It was a huge [...]