Math

Ahhh, Math....I can honestly say I am enjoying teaching math. I hated math growing up. We were not allowed to use our fingers and I was horrible at memorizing all those addition and subtraction problems. The math program I use is MathUSee. It starts out from the very beginning using colored blocks  - the wonderful manipulatives used to actually SEE math work.

It has also helped that while I was working on a Special Ed degree I took a teaching math class. I loved it!!! She taught us how to use the manipulatives to teach. It is sad to say at that time math really started to make sense to me! (Although I loved geometry and trig in high school).

We are behind on what would be considered a regular class setting in that Nico is wrapping up the multiplication book and getting ready to move onto division. The bonus in taking it slow is that he totally gets it. We had a little rough start getting back into math after having the summer off, but a month into he is moving along steadily. I have found that if I put the problems into a word problem he works them so much better than if I just have 76x84 written so he can work it out. I think putting into a picture puzzle gives him the tangible thing he needs. (my right braind learner!) He can actually 'see' what the numbers mean, making the problem worth while to solve.

Here he is working on the factoring page. He was building all the different rectangles and writing the numbers down when it suddenly hit him...."oh, they are the numbers that when multiplied together equal that number!" I love when the light bulb goes on and they figured it out themselves.

Luca is really just learning how to count and make one to one associations. He is also learnig to recognize the numbers themselves. He does enjoy counting. In MathUSee they instruct to count 10 as 'onety', then 'onety-one, onety-two, etc'....it makes total sense to me and he loves saying onety-one. He had to tell Mike he was wrong today when Mike said eleven...Luca said no 'onety-one'. Don't worry they switch over suddenly, on their own, to ten, eleven, twelve, etc. I have found a lot of fun activities to do for math. We will start him on the primer MathUSee later this school year. We play a lot of games. Here he is playing a game from Muggins Math Series with Mike. The kids have the best time playing them. Mike helps quit often with math. He will work with Luca while I am working with Nico. Today, Luca actually asked his dad to come watch him do his lessons. I love it! (as long as I can put Mike to work teaching him - otherwise daddy is a distraction in the classroom).

http://www.2teachingmommies.com/ blog has the most wonderful lesson theme plans! I am totally hooked on their things and have printed out many of the fall ones so we have a different theme to work on each week with different pictures to look at. (I just love the internet!)  Their items cover all subject areas.