Our "One subject per day" experiment

Little Man has had some, uh, motivational difficulties with his schoolwork lately. I decided to try an experiment one day and do just one subject.

 Our first day was a great success. It was an all-math day. If you don't feel that those two sentences should appear in close proximity to one another, read on!

 First, we did some mental math using this book - The Verbal Math Lesson Level 2 -which I just discovered and Love (as much as one can love a math book)

 Little Man loves this because we make the lessons short AND he can do it all orally - no writing. He's a talker. Laboriously scrawling things on paper is worse than having to go to the pink Barbie/princess aisle at WalMart to buy a birthday present. He does a little better on the white board.

 Next, we got out the Fraction manipulatives and worked with those for a bit, then made random designs with them, while I took every opportunity to say, "Oh look, two of the one quarter pieces are the same as a half," and so on.

 My kids love pretty much anything they can do on the computer, so we next went to Khan Academy and he did some three-digit addition with carrying. The videos have always been great, but I love the fact that you can now do math problems and get instant feedback on your answers.

 Finally, we got out the toy cash register and "played." I used Department Store Math   which is great because it has a price list of items by department and pages of problems. The customers come in with all sorts of random needs, for instance: Sam comes in to buy a skateboard and frisbee to take to a picnic this afternoon. Little Man has to look up the prices, add them and then figure out the change to give back. We use real money too. That's a big motivator for him. Not that he gets to keep it or anything. I do the voices of the customers, who are usually so grateful for the help that they invite Little Man to the picnic, or tell him what a great employee he is, or "what a nice young man," if they're the grandmotherly type. Good fun! 

 And there you have it! It was a nice way to mix things up a bit and we both really enjoyed it.

The number of the day

When you accidentally hit upon a way to get the house tidied up, teach the pre-schooler to count and introduce multiplication to your third grader all at once, you just have to share it.

I came up with the idea of the number of the day yesterday and I'll be honest with you - I had only one motive and that was to get some help picking up the clutter that had somehow exploded in our home. The number was five and we each picked up five things in each room that was suffering from excess clutter. Before we got out of the kitchen, Little Man could count to five and really understood what he was doing - you know, not just pointing at one object and saying, "three, four, five." For some reason, it just stuck this time. Excellent! Then it occurred to me to ask Z-Man, "if there are three of us and we each pick up five things, how many is that? How would you write it on the white board?"

Today our number was three. Z-Man was in favor of that, thinking that it meant less work. Much to his chagrin, we did "sets" of three, as in, "pick up three sets of three things from the floor in your room. How many is that? What if I pick up three sets of three too? How could you illustrate that on the white board? What are two ways to write that equation?"

Oh yes, we know how to have fun here. Don't try to stop us.