Once I got my extra week of Christmas vacation, the rest of the month has gone quite smoothly! This month, we used the Snowy Village Math unit from Marsha Johnson's free files on the Waldorf Home Educator's yahoo group. Each week we've told fairy tales that can relate to winter, such as The Snow Maiden, from Russia. We've worked on place value and each of the four processes. Our main focus is on adding and subtracting in columns, with carrying and borrowing. Alot of Waldorf people recommend not introducing carrying and borrowing until next year, but Dallin had already been introduced to these concepts last year in public school. He would have been bored to just add and subtract in columns without this extra challenge, and it made little sense to me to not continue on with something he'd already been exposed to, though granted when he learned it last year, he really struggled with it. Not so this year--he's been right on it!
For our language arts, we've been memorizing a poem. We've been also copying a verse of the poem into a special book each week for handwriting practice. We did the poem Winter, by an anonymous author, found in Eric Fairman's Path of Discovery, Grade Two. It begins:
Oh winter is the resting time,
The sleeping time,
The dreaming time,
Oh winter is the quiet time
When no song is sung...
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| The snowy village houses are tall and narrow, and will be the artistic link that will help with solving math problems in columns. |
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Dallin and I made our own Snowy Village houses. I felt bad because I misunderstood the purpose of this project. I thought the houses were to play a game, using the windows for number cards to add. Dallin struggled to get the floors and windows of his house to line up, and in the end it didn't matter because this was just an art project, nothing more. Alot of angst that didn't need to be!
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Next, a cooking project: baked apples with maple syrup. This idea came from the yahoo group files. Sariah was in heaven since she is our resident cook. I can't even go near the kitchen without my little helper showing up to do her part.
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| Coring the apples. |
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| This recipe, which I googled online, was so easy and so delicious! You basically just core the apples, put in the dish, pour a little water around the bottoms, add about 1/4 maple syrup and some cinnamon, and bake for about half an hour. Yummy and healthy! |
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| Even Dallin proclaimed these "so good!" which is saying something. I couldn't believe he liked them! |
We next worked on a little project, learning to draw 5-pointed stars.
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| We experimented with creating several different shapes. If you have two glass rocks and space them equally apart on the circle, then draw a straight line between them, you get just a line. Three spaced equally makes a triangle, four makes a square, and five makes a star |
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| So after Dallin spaced the glass rocks, we made small marks in their place and drew the lines to create our star. (Dallin added lines to make a pentagon as well.) |
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| We turned this into a form drawing exercise. We did cheat, however, putting a piece of paper with circles and strategically-placed marks behind the paper in his book, so he had a guide by which to draw. |
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| And the best part? We pulled out our boards from last fall and made a string star using the 6-times table, which was our times table last week. Each point around this circle is numbered, there are ten altogether. So you start with the string at the top, then draw it down around the point numbered 6, then up around to 12 (which is the point numbered 2, you use only the "ones" place), then to 18 (or 8), then to 24 (tecnically 4), etc. We didn't know it was going to make a 5-pointed star, so this was a fun surprise to go along with the drawings. |
I had some fun with games this time around, both new games, improvised-on-the-spot activities, and games recycled and altered from last fall's math block.
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| This was one of those days: a hyper kid who didn't want to focus, and the 7's time table to learn, one of the hardest. I had Dallin make little flash cards with the products in the 7's table written on them, 7, 14, 21, etc. But what to do with them? Inspiration hit as my slightly out-of-control child walked around yelling military orders at me and calling me "seargeant". We attached the cards to the wall. Then he had to start at the other end of the room, march to the wall, salute the card, and yell it's number, "se-VEN, four-TEEN, etc." just like he was in the army. He loved it! He had the entire sequence memorized in about a day! |
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| In another lesson/game from her files, Marsha Johnson suggested making this place value poster, making columns with crayons, and labelling each "ones", "tens", etc. We made this last fall, and Dallin had gotten up to the billions. So I had a flash of inspiration as to how we could use this. Dallin loves number dictations, as I posted in December. We got a die. He rolled the die, and whatever he landed on told him how many digits the number would have. Then we used glass rocks labelled with number between zero and nine. He had to randomly gather the right number of rocks and make up a number by putting the rocks at the tops of the columns. Then he had to read the number correctly. He loved this game! |
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| Another game, the Number Game, was also suggested in the files for this unit. This game covered all four processes. We made cards with numbers zero to nine on them, then four cards with the symbols for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. He had to draw a process card and a number card. I then gave him a base number to work with, and he had to do what the process card said with each of the number cards. For example, he drew an addition card, so I made the base number "54", and he then had to add each of the numbers one to nine to the number 54. Not hard, but good practice for basic facts. For multiplication, I would make a smaller base number that I knew he could do, like 3 or 4, and he'd have to multiply that number by every number. Division was a bit tricky, and some of the numbers we picked had remainders. Dallin isn't as comfortable with division, so he used glass rocks as counters. He really liked this game too! |
We also played a variation on the Bean Game from the Our Little Nature Nest website (see my sidebar). We had written numbers on tons of dried lima beans last fall and put them in a basket. Our version of the game this time went like this: Each player draws four beans out of the basket and creates an addition problem for his or her opponent. With your four beans, you make two 2-digit numbers, and your opponent has to add them mentally. This is so that Mom can create appropriate problems for Dallin that he is capable of solving, and Dallin can create whatever problem he wants to try and stump Mom. (Which doesn't ever happen, by the way!) Dallin loved this game too! I'm telling you, math games are the way to go!
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| Now the "houses" come into play. This is such a great, creative idea for learning to carry and borrow! Make a little "house", put the numbers in it. Answers go in the "basement", the numbers being added or subtracted go on the first and second "floors". The carried or borrowed number goes in the attic. This has really helped Dallin to solve these types of problems and remember what goes where. He made this great Main Lesson Book page to illustrate the concept, and you can see some of his practice problems on the next page. |
Sariah's accomplishment of the week is that she can now jumprope up to twenty jumps without stopping! She practices hard every day.
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