Over the month of November, the boys took a 4-part Lego building class, from the people at Bricks 4 Kidz. The class was arranged by my friend and fabulous homeschooling Mom Lisa, who also hosted it at her house. It was loosely tied to the ‘building things’ portion of the Alberta curriculum, looking at principles [...]
The boys and I have been reading several titles in the Hello Math Reader series. This somewhat older series combines learning to read and math stories, and each book has several pages of suggested follow-up activities to try. As with any series, some titles and activities have interested us more than others. Today’s activities went [...]
The last couple days have been a bit of a write-off, as we got the last of the renos done to put the basement back together after the sewage back-up last September. Bang! Pound! Bang! as the new underlay and carpet were installed. We LOVE the new carpet—its much softer on the feet than the [...]
I mentioned that last week we got some new board games, like Sum Swamp. The other day, the boys had a chance to try the Animalogic (US) game. It’s a series of logic puzzles, in which you need to get the animals across the river, one at a time (via the teeny bridge): Any animal not [...]
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 [...]