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 [...]
Daegan is sooooo excited! Multiplication Vacation, the DVD from a company called Googol Power, finally arrived in today’s mail. It’s sold out at both the publisher and Indigo/Chapters (Canada’s biggest book retailer), so tracking a copy down was a challenge. I finally found one used on amazon. Daegan asked me to get it months ago [...]
Today I signed the boys up for xtramath, an online math fact drill site. Do you know about this site? It’s a really well done free site (and ad-free too!) where kids get guided practice in mastering their basic math facts: addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, through the 10 by 10 grid. The program tracks [...]
A couple days ago I learned of a new-to-me website called Top Documentary Films (link here), and on it I was thrilled to find The Story of 1, a math documentary featuring Terry Jones (of Monty Python fame) that I’ve been looking for for a while now. (Update: If the previous link is no longer [...]
I came across a new way to practice your times tables, based on a honeycomb shape with all the different products (using factors from 2 to 9) in it: All the numbers (products) have a unique answer (factors), except for the shaded middle row which have 2 answers apiece. So the student ‘sweeping’ the grid [...]
Have you heard about this sale? Scholastic is having a sale on 800+ of their titles, all PDF books to be downloaded for $1. You can find the sale here. I ordered a bunch over the weekend, including titles like: Easy Make and Learn Projects: Human Body (we’re doing Human Body this year) 25 wacky [...]
The boys and I have been working our way through the simply fabulous list of “living math books” from Julie Brennen, who runs the LivingMathForum e-mail group. You can find the list of books, organized by topic (addition, fractions, geometry, etc.) here. And what is a “living book” you may ask? A “living” book is [...]
Over the summer the boys and I have explored a variety of DVDs, including one we watched a couple weeks back and really enjoyed, called The Lion’s Share: A Tale of Halving Cake and Eating It, Too by Matthew McElligott. (There’s a picture book as well). I can’t do better than the summary on the [...]
I’ve found several math apps the boys are enjoying, from creative games covering a wide variety of math topics (the oft- and deservedly-praised Rocket Math) to those focused on particular topics (like fractions, or telling time), to highly customizable flashcard drill (Flash to Pass free, Math Drills Lite), to those that use games to get [...]
This morning the boys and I played a round of Contig Jr., which is a great game/activity for practicing math facts. You can find a printable game board here. The game involves rolling 3 dice, and using various mathematical operations to cover numbers on the game board (both pennies and dimes fit this job well). [...]