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Math

If you were a fly on the wall during a math lesson here, you'd probably see us playing games. That's one of the things I like most about the Math with Confidence curriculum. We toss beanbags to practice counting (Alina now loves to join in), we play card games or set up pretend stores, we have little races or hunts to find objects and make equations with them. It's very hands-on and visual. 

We had been working hard on basic addition facts for several weeks, and then last week the lessons switched to shapes. I felt like it was a welcome switch, but also some of the shape lessons seemed too basic and repetitive for Anya. We ended up condensing two weeks' worth of lessons into one week, to speed through the basic stuff and then focus on the newer concepts: halves, fourths, and congruent shapes. 

There was a lot of paper cutting and folding, and some sample cutting of plums into halves and fourths. 

The warm-ups (at the beginning of the lessons) and math activity pages (at the very end) continued to review addition facts. 

Now, after our two-for-one week, I have decided to hold off on moving into subtraction and spend some more time on addition. The end of each unit includes information on how to know if your student is ready to move on, and based on the current checkpoint I think Anya could use another week of playing addition games and marinating in the addition facts. 

We'll play some more Addition War and Addition Climb to the Top, have an addition scavenger hunt, and play some sort of jumping/dancing game with addition fact cards set out on the floor (that one is still taking shape in my mind). 

She has been working through about 10 addition problems per day in the math activity book, so we'll continue that with some free worksheets I found online. 

Then, maybe next week we'll get back to following the lesson plans as written! 

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