Sariah's second grade math

I've had several people request that I post pictures of the kids' work, so I will try to do so within the next few weeks.  I have a new computer!  Hurray!

I'll start with Sariah's math this past year.  We covered the following topics and skills: even and odd numbers, place value, columnar addition and subtraction, further progress with the concepts of multiplication and division, measurement of time, times tables, and factoring.  These are typical things taught in a Waldorf second grade.  In some ways the skill development seems slower than a mainstream school (we haven't even covered regrouping yet), but in other ways it is faster--we have been doing multiplication and division since first grade.  All four operations are taught and worked with at the same time in order to highlight how they are related.  Overall I think Sariah's doing pretty well.  There were times throughout the year that I worried, but I've seen great progress as we've neared the end of school.  She is especially getting better at solving problems mentally.  The one thing that I would say went terribly is learning the times tables.  I know most mainstream schools don't teach them till 4th grade or so (if at all), but in Waldorf it is supposed to be the overarching theme of 2nd grade math.  Sariah was not buying into this idea at all.  It would be accurate to say that Mom spent a lot of time this year practicing the times tables.  Too bad Mom already knows them!  Mom jump-roped the tables, Mom did hand-clapping and beanbag-tossing games to the tables, Mom sang silly times table songs, Mom skipped and stepped the tables... you name it, Mom did it.  And around about March, Mom gave up.  We will try again next year, and Mom will spend a good part of her summer trying to figure out the best way to do this.   Sariah really understands multiplication well, but without knowing the tables, solving problems can be difficult.

Here are a few main lesson book samples:

I think this is the very first page she did, reviewing the four operations from last year with representative problems from each one.  This page was also introducing the block theme of squirrels.

Her story page from introducing place value.  The individual sticks (ones) are bundled together when enough are collected (tens), then the bundles are piled into crates (hundreds), and finally, ten crates can be put on a wagon (thousand).

The squirrels were taught how to write their math problems up and down on the tree trunks.  The colors help keep track of the "places".  (This is from the Christopherus math curriculum.)

Later on, we made "plaid pages" on which to solve columnar problems.

She made a page for each times tables.

We also used string to map the designs of the times tables, and she then copied the designs in her book.

At the end of the year, we made factor trees, where we broke down numbers into their parts.  This page shows addition factors, but we also made trees using multiplication.

In January was our "Time" block.  We told stories from several cultures involving time.  We talked about years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, etc.  We worked on telling time.  Sariah's favorite project was making a calendar for the whole year.  She worked on it for weeks after the block was over and was insistent that we get it done.  I think she did a fabulous job with it, so I'm posting some of her best pages:

  

For each month, we had a snippet of a poem that she used as a basis for her illustration.

Our last block focused on reviewing the four operations through a story about worker in a logging camp.  (This idea came from the Magic of Waldorf website.)  It was super fun!  She drew cute pictures of each of the loggers and then on the opposite page, wrote and solved the appropriate problems.

(She striped the paper to look like logs.)