Four years ago I taught math to Dallin using the book Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder and lesson ideas from Marsha Johnson. This past month, Sariah had the same block, and it was just as popular with her as it was with her older brother. Here is Dallin's block:
http://www.jeefamily.blogspot.com/2011/11/farmer-boy-math.html
http://www.jeefamily.blogspot.com/2011/11/farmer-boy-part-two.html
First of all, I can't neglect to post photos of Sariah's first handwork project of the school year. This knitted horse took her two months to complete, but she did a splendid job.
When Dallin did this block, we culminated it with cooking a huge dinner Wilder family style, using recipes from The Little House Cookbook. This year I just didn't feel up to that, especially knowing that Thanksgiving was just around the corner, and that would mean another entire day in the kitchen. So I opted to have Sariah do one smaller cooking project per week, and we focused just on desserts and sweets from the book.
Week 1 was doughnuts:
Week 2 was Birds' Nest Pudding: (Sariah insisted that we beat the egg whites stiff by hand because that's how Mother Wilder would have done it. So we did--and it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. Afterwards we served the pudding with whipping cream.)
Week 3 was ice cream: (True confessions--while the recipe is authentic 19th century and can be found online here: http://littlehouseontheprairie.com/old-fashioned-ice-cream-recipe/, I decided to forego additional authenticity in favor of using my lovely and very convenient Cuisinart ice cream maker rather than spending 1.5 hours stirring this by hand.)
Week 4 was pies--one custard pie from the book and two pumpkin pies not from the book:
Just as I did with Dallin, Sariah and I also did the Popcorn Experiment as described in Farmer Boy, which involves seeing if you can put a whole cup of popcorn into a whole cup of milk, one piece at a time, without it overflowing.
After reading about Mother Wilder dyeing her own wool from roots, leaves, and other natural objects her children collected from the woods, Sariah and I tried our own natural dyeing project--wool yarn with black beans. There are many tutorials for this online. Our yarn turned out a lovely, gentle shade of greyish blue.
Last month's artistic focus was painting, so this month we worked with drawing/coloring. Just as Dallin did, I had Sariah do a drawing of a farm scene from each season of the year. We used Sigliende de Francesca's Coloring with Block Crayons book for inspiration, as she has as section on how to create seasonal drawings, but then adapted things to also incorporate farming scenes inspired by Farmer Boy.
For winter's drawing, she worked with the idea of leaving white space; also using blues and purples to evoke the feeling of coldness.
For spring, she worked with negative space again, coloring around the area where the tree was.
Yellow skies show warmth and heat for summertime. She left the sun white and colored around it.
Reds, yellows, and oranges for autumn.
Our math focus was on columnar addition and subtraction with carrying and borrowing. I took the advice in the book Making Math Meaningful by Jamie York to wait until grade 3 for these two concepts. York feels that jumping to columnar addition/carrying and borrowing too quickly messes with children fully developing the sense of number that comes from adding numbers horizontally. I did introduce columnar addition at the end of last school year, but waited for regrouping. Whether the wait has made a difference or not, I'm not sure, but Sariah has picked both of these skills up so easily that I'm pleased.
Using Marsha Johnson's idea, we used the image of a barn, with the attic area to put the carried number, and the manure trap underneath for the answer.
Sariah loves math! This is such a welcome relief after all the struggles we've had with reading. Every morning we work on math facts, and I scoured the internet to find unique ways to practice these. After all, I do have a child with ADHD, and novelty is the way to go. We can't do flashcards every single day or even toss a beanbag every single day; that just won't fly with Sariah. With Dallin, he wasn't interested in creative practice ideas. As long as we tossed a ball back and forth, he was good.
I came up with about a month's worth of practice ideas for Sariah, so we could do a new one each day, and I'll recycle them for future months. Some of the things we have done include: write the answers on index cards and tape on the wall, then when she finds the right answer to a particular problem, she gets to take it down and tape it on Mom; write problems on index cards with multiple choice options and let her use a hole punch to punch out the correct answer; play Memory with problems and answers; tape index cards with problems all over the house and have to find and then answer each one; write all the answers on the chalkboard and she has to erase each correct answer as she solves it; and give her a plastic bag filled with shaving cream and have her "write" the correct answer on top of the bag.
Being homeschooled with Waldorf methods, Sariah has done very few worksheets. To her they are a novelty. This month she begged for worksheets, so I did have her do a few. After she got the concepts of carrying and borrowing down pretty well, and in order to alleviate boredom in practicing, I used some of the ideas in the Math By Hand curriculum to provide interest to our math work. These basically involved fun number tricks, problems which all work out to the same answer, etc. when done a certain way, yet still provided plenty of practice with carrying and borrowing.
We worked on songs and poetry as we do each month. She chose to learn a poem called Something Told the Wild Geese, and on Thanksgiving morning she and I were able to recite it together from memory for Daddy.
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