Last week I wrote about the “What Number Am I?” problems Daegan has been enjoying, and asked you to send along any questions you or your kids made up. MamaGames sent us a wonderful question from her son, KarateKid, who is about the same age as Daegan. (Daegan loved seeing KarateKid break a board with [...]
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 [...]
Since we started our “Problem of the Day” approach, Daegan and I have been having many more math conversations. We’re doing fewer questions, but at far more depth. And, I am very happy to report, Daegan has been asking me more questions, of all kinds. Here are some recent questions we’ve tackled as “problems of [...]
Yesterday the boys and I left the workbooks, and did some activities around negative numbers as Daegan has been asking to learn about them. I adapted ideas I found on two very helpful blogs, here and here. I began by writing a problem of the day on our board, leaving Daegan to mull it over: [...]
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 [...]
For a couple weeks now the boys have been expressing an interest in Ancient Egypt, our first foray into people history, rather than that of dinosaurs and animals. Yay! Admittedly, it was Daegan who first brought up the topic, after Jim mentioned a show about dinosaur finds in Egypt, and got the companion book for [...]
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 [...]
Had another quiet day today, as I came down with Daegan’s cold. The boys managed to amuse themselves (and eat all the banana muffins in the house!) while I got a much needed 4-hour nap. Bless them! So not much to post about today, but here’s a small moment I wrote up a couple weeks [...]
I saw these videos about using unifix cubes to show how to get the average (mean) of three numbers, and figured they would mesh well with a problem of the day. The kernel for my version of this problem was Day 16 here. Here it is: Last week, the high temperature of the day was [...]
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 [...]