Homeschool Happenings: Math with the Littles

My two littles are so easy to teach. I figure I’ll ride this joy train as long as it lasts LOL!

They wake up ready to go to school. Their older brothers … well that is another post for another day LOL!

I typically work to teach the little ones at least one new *concept* in math each week.

Really at this point it is just to introduce them, but they really are learning a lot!

Li’l Miss can count to 100 now! I am so proud of her. She is close to counting by 10s to 100, but for now she can to 100.

Li’l Dude knows the names of all of his shapes and seems to get the relationship between 2-dimensional shapes and their 3-dimensional counterparts. This has been learned mostly spontaneously, but he is a LEGO maniac and he just seems to think in a way that lends itself to shapes and prisms.

In the last few weeks, we have played games to learn math concepts in fun ways. They continue to use their Math Copywork books as well.

They both love a game of Candy*land, and most always I incorporate some type of math review with it. Each time they roll, I ask them a question and they try to answer. On this particular day, I was quizzing them on the numbers 1-20. I have an old 4×6 photo brag book that I filled with 4×6-size numbers 1-20.

After they would roll and move their gingerbread man, I would call out a random number 1-20 and they had to turn to that number in the book. Their favorite part is if they got it correct, they pulled the card out and kept it. If they got it wrong, the card stayed in the number book until they got it correct. Once they were through the numbers, we put the book away and just finished the game, but they wanted to play more with the number cards!

In this next math lesson, I worked with the littles on addition. They have both shown spontaneously that they are thinking on this, so I figured we would work on it.

I pulled out our education cube number insert cards (0-10) and took them upstairs where the little cars are stored. I told them we would be driving around picking up numbers to make an *equation*. I had them write this word in their copywork books, and explained to them in very simple terms what the word means.

They LOVED this game! I told them to do three equations, but they did many more. Li’l Miss wrote a lot in her math copywork book.

Li’l Dude opted to do the required three though he drove around picking up more numbers and figuring out more equations. I also gave them counting bears to use if needed, but honestly they didn’t use them for all of the problems.

You may see in the photos that I also gave them the + and = magnet (like magnet letters but number set instead) to use to make their equations. They really like this. It helped them to write the equations on their papers.
*Yes, she added 9 + 8! She counted the bears and said, “17!”*
*And he added 10 + 5! He struggled a little bit with thirteen and fourteen, but he got there to 15!”*

One day, we were talking about being first or last, and Li’l Miss was asking me about the other numbers after first. That got me to thinking about teaching them ordinal numbers first through fifth. I thought a hands-on lesson would work best, so I grabbed some pipe cleaners and foam shapes with holes in the middle for threading them.

They really liked this and both spontaneously made “patterns” on their pipe cleaners. After they had put five shapes on their pipe cleaner, I would call out an ordinal number and ask them to point to that shape on their pipe cleaner. I made sure to have them hold them upright and made sure they knew the top one was “first”.

They did extremely well with this. After the object lesson, I wrote “first”, “second” and “third” on the whiteboard and had them copy this in their math copywork books. I will work on more ordinal numbers later since this went so well!

Today we worked on shapes again and I was pleased to see they knew the eight basic ones and I had them write this in their math copywork books.

I pulled out some very old scrapbooking supplies with all of those shapes on them, and they liked tracing with the templates. I had them write the names of the shapes in or beside them in their notebooks.

We also worked on an art project which allowed them to cut out different shapes freehand. They put a lot into this and we decided to extend it to a second day.