Math? If you don't use a curriculum...

[kidsnbooks8]

for grade K-3 for Math, what sort of plan do you follow? I will have a Pre-K , K and 2nd grader and I would like to just use books,manipulatives, games and the white board. I just need a plan of attack:001_huh:

 

If you do math this way, could you explain what a lesson looks like at your house? And, If you say, OK we will start with addition, do you keep working on just that until they have that mastered and then move to the next concept, or do you just read, play games and do white board activities in a varied way and check things off on a list?

[HomesteadMommy]

I've been exploring different math ideas as well. I just found a great blog with lots of math game ideas. Hope this helps!

http://blog.aussiepumpkinpatch.com/search/label/living%20math

[Ellie]

Remember that "curriculum" does not mean "that textbook on the table there." It means "the course of study offered by an institution of education." If you know what you want your dc to learn in any particular subject, *that's* your curriculum.

 

Check out this article. It gives suggestions for teaching basic arithmetic skills without using any textbooks.

[Guest]

I did not use any packaged program or textbook until 7th grade for my daughter. We did a combination of things:

 

--reading lots and lots of math picture books. There are so many wonderful ones these days. We particularly liked the Miss Bindergarten series, the Sir Cumference books, Measuring Penny and It's Probably Penny by Loreen Leedy. Each book sparked a project of some kind, whether acting out the story, doing the activities the characters in the book did, etc.

 

--Peggy Kaye's book Games For Math was a treasure. We played math from that nearly daily.

 

--I used TOPS Lentil Science for a couple of years. It's a bit messy, and a pain to set up (although they do offer a kit that really cuts down on the work involved), but it's a great way for kids to work fairly independently learning about adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing without written numbers -- just the concepts.

 

--Math games, like RushHour Junior, Gobblet Jr., Mastermind Jr. etc. You get the idea.

 

--Marilyn Burns math books are excellent resources and are organized by topic and grade level. They are not workbooks, but a series of lessons aimed at conceptual understanding and exploration of a particular idea or problem. http://www.mathsolutions.com

 

--Origami (oversized), tangrams, pentominoes, and pattern blocks got a lot of use at our house. All kinds of blocks: cubes, Kapla blocks, anything.

 

--sticker math books were an enormous hit.

[Corraleno]

Check out this article. It gives suggestions for teaching basic arithmetic skills without using any textbooks.

THANK YOU for that link, Ellie!!! I read this article a year or so ago and found it so inspiring, but I've never been able to find it again, because I couldn't remember the title or the author or where I found it. I've now bookmarked it in three different folders, and I'll print it out as well. I think this article belongs in the "books that affected your homeschooling" thread as well!

 

Jackie

[selh09]

I've been exploring different math ideas as well. I just found a great blog with lots of math game ideas. Hope this helps!

http://blog.aussiepumpkinpatch.com/search/label/living%20math

 

This is a great blog! I follow this blog and use a lot of the ideas for our math!!

[gaillardia]

Hey, these look like very helpful and useful links, thanks!

I browse around the forum looking for just stuff to help and find a thread like this, I guess that's why I keep on logging in.

I have bookmarked lots of sites.

Thank you everyone!:)

KarenAnne: what did your daughter use when you started her with textbook/packaged curriculum in or after 7th grade?

[selh09]

Try the Living Math website.

:iagree:

[bradandmeplus2]

Marilyn Burns has several great books if you would like to use literature to teach math. Super fun activities!

[debbielong]

http://www.amazon.com/Family-Math-Young-Children-Comparing/dp/0912511273/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1282686683&sr=8-2

[kidsnbooks8]

Thank you for all the great replies. The Pumpkin Patch blog is one of my favorites:001_smile:

 

I have tons of books, manipulatives and games. I just feel like I need a plan to use all these great materials. So I guess, I could just use a grade 2 or 3 textbook and start going through the list of concepts and see what I have that will cover it and plan the list that way. :confused: I was also thinking of having a Math meeting where we would go over the calendar, shapes, patterns, money, flashcards, and have a daily math puzzle(Mathmania) to work through together. I would like to put together a board with these things on it to go over a few times a week.

 

If anyone has any other ideas, I would love to hear them.

[Guest]

Your mention of a calendar reminded me of something we did on and off for years. I had a dry erase-marker calendar, oversized, and each month we took off and put on the date stickers. I would say things like, "Take off all the odd numbers between nineteen and twenty-seven," or "Put on the numbers that are Tuesdays in this month" (assuming we already had one or more dates up). It started off fairly simple but got more complex as she got older. We only did this once a month, when we took down the old numbers and put up the new ones, but it's amazing how much got practiced over time.

 

My dd also loved making a "personal numbers" book. I made a fill-in-the-blanks type of booklet with things like her height (we cut a string that length and taped one end in), a chart of her growth over time, her shoe size, how many pancakes she could eat at one sitting, how far she could jump, how long she could hold her breath... anything and everything I could think of. Eventually we used it to begin graphing: eye colors in our extended family, the range of heights, curly vs. straight hair, near-sighted, far-sighted, or perfect vision, who could curl their tongue, etc. We graphed her allowance and the money she saved. You can get wildly creative and it's all fun if the child helps measure, draw, and graph.

 

Again, this doesn't have to correlate to any specifics of where you are in a math book. It's just fun, general practice and exposure that really adds up over time.

[kidsnbooks8]

KarenAnne, I love those ideas!!

 

Thank you:001_smile:

[cschnee]

You could take a peek at Home Learning Year by Year by Rebecca Rupp to get an idea of what a kid "should" be working on for each year. I used that plus a lot of the same resources that KarenAnne did for my children in their younger years. There are lots of GEMS (Great Explorations in Math and Science) and AIMS (Activities Integrating Math and Science) guides for younger grades too.

[Angie in VA]

We played games, did real life math stuff, sang along to skip counting tapes and drilled math facts the summers our dc turned 10. That was it till they got a book, after turning 10.

 

Here's a link to an article by the Bluedorns that quotes the Benezet article Ellie linked.

 

http://www.triviumpursuit.com/articles/research_on_teaching_math.php

Edited August 25, 2010 by Angie in VA

[Corraleno]

My dd also loved making a "personal numbers" book. I made a fill-in-the-blanks type of booklet with things like her height (we cut a string that length and taped one end in), a chart of her growth over time, her shoe size, how many pancakes she could eat at one sitting, how far she could jump, how long she could hold her breath... anything and everything I could think of. Eventually we used it to begin graphing: eye colors in our extended family, the range of heights, curly vs. straight hair, near-sighted, far-sighted, or perfect vision, who could curl their tongue, etc. We graphed her allowance and the money she saved. You can get wildly creative and it's all fun if the child helps measure, draw, and graph.

 

:w00t: I am totally doing this tomorrow with DD7! How do you think of these things????

 

Jackie

[Guest]

:w00t: I am totally doing this tomorrow with DD7! How do you think of these things????

 

Jackie

 

Desperation leads to marvelous inventiveness.

 

I had a child who fought any and everything remotely conventional or formal, plus had dysgraphia. So I had no choice, for my own sanity and well-being not to mention hers, to think as out of the box as I could.

[Guest]

[quote=gingerh;1981408

KarenAnne: what did your daughter use when you started her with textbook/packaged curriculum in or after 7th grade?

 

She used Crossing the River With Dogs, a book that is organized around methods and strategies for solving problems rather than conventional mathematical topics. It is mostly pre-algebra, with a little algebra thrown in. It's marketed as variously a basic college text or a high school text, but we had little trouble. Each chapter has problems ranging from very simple to quite difficult, and when we ran into harder ones near the end of the problem sets we just stopped there (I didn't have the teacher's edition, which would have helped!). We went through that fairly quickly, so she also had a book I made her of math puzzles I found on the internet and in various books, plus word problems turned into Star Trek problems (she's an Aspie and had a Star Trek fixation that year).

 

Key Curriculum Press publishes Crossing the River With Dogs, but I got it used from amazon.

 

In 8th grade she transitioned to a regular honors algebra book and it went very smoothly. Sadly, it was also less fun and interesting than our earlier work and she is now math-resistant. I'm puzzling what to do for 9th grade.

Edited August 25, 2010 by Guest

[Earth Angel_79]

Fantastic ideas Karen Anne!! I'm using a curriculum now, but I'm replying to this thread too so I don't lose it later in case things don't work out.

[Farrar]

We didn't use a curriculum for K last year. In addition to some of the things already suggested, we relied a lot on books. My kids are especially receptive to stories and books. We especially like the Math Start books by Stuart J. Murphy, the Greg Tang books and Loreen Leedy's various books that cover math topics.

[kidsnbooks8]

Originally posted by farrarwilliams

We didn't use a curriculum for K last year. In addition to some of the things already suggested, we relied a lot on books. My kids are especially receptive to stories and books. We especially like the Math Start books by Stuart J. Murphy, the Greg Tang books and Loreen Leedy's various books that cover math topics.

__________________

 

 

I have a lot of these books too. Did you just read any book at any time or did you have a list of concepts and read the ones that went with the concept?

[Farrar]

We would do both. We would concentrate on a certain topic and take off lots of books about it from the library as well as doing activities and so forth. But we would also just have lots of math books around. I also should have mentioned the various math books by Mitsamusa Anno, which we love.

[Guest Alte Veste Academy]

I have tons of books, manipulatives and games. I just feel like I need a plan to use all these great materials. So I guess, I could just use a grade 2 or 3 textbook and start going through the list of concepts and see what I have that will cover it and plan the list that way. :confused: I was also thinking of having a Math meeting where we would go over the calendar, shapes, patterns, money, flashcards, and have a daily math puzzle(Mathmania) to work through together. I would like to put together a board with these things on it to go over a few times a week.

 

If anyone has any other ideas, I would love to hear them.

 

Have you seen this thread? The links in the first post are gold. :001_smile: