Math Adventures

The children who come to my class for math are exploring some new topics, as well as continuing work on older skills. We've been starting each class with our Singapore Mathematics books, and students have been making amazing progress by working at their own pace. It is very helpful to have another adult in the room at this time, as 11 children are usually in 11 totally different places. Currently, we have children from 1-B to just beginning 3-B. We started the year by doing just 10 or 15 minutes in our books, but our attention spans have increased and it is now not unusual for the children to be steadily engrossed for 20 or even 25 minutes.

After the math books are put away, I've been challenging the children with a mathematical drawing or riddle drawn on the board. These number puzzles are from a deck called "Mensa for Kids". So far, it has taken just a few minutes for the children to collectively come up with the answers, and I love to hear their thinking processes.

Another thing recently added is reading aloud from The Adventures of Penrose the Mathematical Cat, by Theoni Pappas. Many higher-order mathematical concepts are introduced in a very fun and playful way, like binary numbers, tessellations, the fibonacci sequence, etc.










Work continues on our How to Multiply book! It is a big job. The children are working together to write stories and draw pictures to make a book - and this book will help other children understand what multiplication is, and to learn the facts from the 2's table to the 10's table. Here are a couple recent examples, Niccolo and Evie:

Lastly, we started today to do quick 5 minute timed challenges of the multiplication facts from 2s to 5s. The children know it is not a competition between each other, but they are challenged to try to do more problems in the allotted time each day (to beat their own last goal).

Whew! That 45 minutes goes fast! A continued thanks to my wonderful math helpers.