My daughter, currently eleven years old, believes she is "bad at math" because computation steps don't stick in her head. We've gone over long division and adding fractions repeatedly, and it just doesn't stick. It doesn't make sense to her, and she's the kind of learner who wants to understand the Why of something before she'll understand the How or What. In most areas of our homeschooling journey, we unschool. This means I keep a gentle pulse on what my children are learning through experience and play. But like many unschooling mamas, I wonder about math. How much is "enough"? When we sit down to "do a little math," it often ends (at least with my daughter) in tears, anger, and frustration. It doesn't matter that I explain that she actually is skilled at math - her numeracy skills are fabulous and her ability to see patterns and relationships is quite advanced. It doesn't matter that I point out the math she uses in Min...
My kids have never gone to regular school. My daughter spent three miserable days in a preschool till I said "Enough" and never went back. That's it. She's nine now, and her brother is five. Mostly we unschool. But I still find myself needing to shift my thinking away from the schooling mentality. I am getting my teaching license, but through an alternative program so I can teach for a homeschool enrichment program that my kids attend weekly and is offered through the public schools. As most homeschooling moms, I have looked at the local schools' websites to see where my kids might just fit in. I feel that professionally and as a member of society I always have one foot in the schooling door. However, any time I think about teaching full-time in a regular school, or enrolling my kids in school, I quickly come to the same conclusion: Nope. I am fully committed to homeschooling. I love the freedom my kids have to become themselves. I love that more than half of th...
Today we worked on regrouping using Math-U-See manipulatives. We used just the 100s, 10s, and unit pieces. I drew a large grid for spaces for each of the numerals, and used problems in our Brainquest workbook. We added the units together, trading them out for tens if we had more than 10, then placing that ten above the two other rows, just as you would when writing it out. Then we did the same with the tens bars, pulling out groups of ten tens and then placing the new 100 plate above the 100s place of our rows. We then wrote out what we did in the workbook. Subtracting with regrouping was a little different. We took away the number of units in the second row from the units in the top row, and moved the remaining units to the bottom (answer) row. If there weren't enough units in the top row, we converted a tens bar into 10 units cubes and put them in that upper right square. We then subtracted how many we had un the middle right square and put the remaining units cubes in...
Comments
Post a Comment