Help me before I have to write all my own worksheets.

My 5 year old DD is a typical visual-spatial kindergartener: likes to be able to color something on the page, likes pictures, likes things presented graphically, can't read and is turned off by blocks of numbers.

We're afterschooling and have been doing second grade things but she's ready to move on to either third or fourth in most areas (measurement, fractions, geometry, patterns and logic, multiplication and division). But we have a huge problem - I can't find anything pre-written that isn't a huge leap in terms of presentation style from the second grade stuff.

She will turn off completely if I try and show her that. So I've been winging it and drawing my own puzzles and games and questions. Which is exhausting and nerve-wracking (I'm not a homeschooler at heart).

I've got a couple of websites with games, and we've read (and loved) all of the Sir Cumference books, and some of the other ones by the same publisher (like A Place For Zero). For area and perimeter we're drawing pictures and tonight she did a fractions sheet I copied from a flashkids workbook and made harder. Shapes and manipulating and measuring them is a big interest at the moment. We do origami and tangrams and I'm about to prepare some tesselation activities. Help!

I'm trying to get the GATE teacher at school to help me, but it's not proving easy.

Hi!

Have you tried: http://www.softschools.com/

We have found some useful worksheets from this website. It is free for the most part.

Also, although you mentioned that your DD cannot read, any chance that you or someone can read the problem/question with her? If so and if you allow her to play on the computer, DCs really enjoy:

http://www.mathplayground.com/

There is a whole section of learning math using manipulative.

Good luck!
Mag

Oh, they are cool sites, thank you! They're perfect.

do you have an ipod touch? my son is 4.5 and doing 3rd grade math....and we have found the thing he loves to work with the best is the ipod touch. there are so many great educational apps!

momma2many - do you have any recommendations on which apps are good? I'm feeling similar to Tallulah.

Take a look at RightStart math. Also, a small white board (rather than worksheets or paper) works wonders for little attitudes.

Instead of worksheets, have you tried just showing her the concepts in real life and focusing on mental math? Fractions in your recipes and geometry in household objects? Decimals on your grocery shopping trip? The beauty of elementary school math is that it is so accessible and intuitive and prevalent in every day life. If you were to use the standard pre-written stuff, couldn't you just read it to her and accept her verbal responses?

Just the idea of even a second grade math curriculum (much less third grade) without reading and writing is so foreign in our school district! There has been such a shift towards verbalizing math that even in second grade, the students are required to explain their math answers in words at least some of the time. Even simple arithmetic problems in second grade (and some in first grade) tend to involve reading a couple of sentences even when an explanation is not required in the answer. It seems so wrong to me and likely to preclude many mathematically talented students from participating in the more advanced math programs in the early elementary years.

What about these as a possiblity? Word problems, but just a few per page and lots of bright, friendly, big pictures:
http://www.flashkids.com/

Also, the series of workbooks for gifted kids that's mentioned in another thread, Math for the Gifted Student, has lots of big, bright pictures:
http://productsearch.barnesandnoble...gifted+student&flag=False&ugrp=2

She might love the supermind magnetic game if she likes the tanagrams.
What's wrong with plain stencils and pencils? It can always turn into a straight edge and compass when she gets older. When she gets older she can have the book "building stars and polygons" but for now a sacred geometry coloringbook from Michaels is fine. I think kindergarten is a great year to start sorting and wrapping coins you bought from the bank. It's cheaper than the base ten sets because it didn't cost anything, you still have all the money.

Idk if i've a homeschoolers heart or if I'm a latent closet shopaholic who now has a childrens education to blame it on guilt free. This is new.

Dead thread bump!


Good suggestion, this is pretty much what we've been doing. We've got the books I posted about a bit after this, the second grade extension work has been fun written work, a lot of mental math, lots of sit down and draw things or show using manipulatives. I've been super unschooler mother. Of course it means that she's now all over the place wrt level on each topic. So we've started EPGY to make sure any gaps are filled in.

LOL, I was the OP in that thread. And those are the books the school is using for enrichment, too!

One quick suggestion, in case you haven't seen it yet. The British MEP curriculum offers free worksheets from Kindy (they call it Reception) onwards. We've loved the puzzle-like format.
http://www.cimt.plymouth.ac.uk/projects/mepres/primary/default.htm

ROFL. Exactly.

I put together a "measurement" math center in a plastic storage box when my DD was about that age. Alas, she was the polar opposite, in that she LOATHED manipulatives of any kind and loved to read.

Anyway.
I think that most of the books in this series are a great deal of fun:

Shoebox Math Learning Centers

Unfortunately, they were also a LOT of work for me to set up for just my DD, who rapidly progressed right out of them... I just recall that there were a TON of activities in that one that didn't rely upon reading skills and seemed to be directly aimed at your child's specific interests. One was a series of shapes printed with grids that could be colored in... another involved skip counting with fun pictures to color, etc.

It tops out at about third grade, however.

Another idea: a 'beginner balance' (two-pan with a center fulcrum) and gram cubes (Nasco sells them in a big bucket-- they can be used like Unifix cubes or linked and used as Cuisinaire rods, too).

Our measurement box contained: a flexible cloth tape measure, a rain guage, a thermometer, the beginner balance and gram cubes, a stopwatch, paper and pens, and a variety of containers labeled with volumes. That's what I remember, anyway.



Wonder if this would be good?
Mega-Fun Card Game Math Gr 3-5 It's certainly inexpensive enough to be low-risk, anyway.

I'm sure that someone somewhere has probably already mentioned this one:
Mystery Pictures-- multiplication I know that "coloring" kids love those-- but anti-drill-n-kill kids may rapidly develop quite the aversion to them, too. (BTDT.)

There is also MathArt Grades 3-5, which is terrific for kids to explore concepts like place value and statistics via art projects.

My own DD loved stuff like this: Math Mysteries but they would definitely require a parent/teacher to be reading to the child if s/he can't yet read well. Still, they are quite clever and engaging, which is appealing to GT kids. (Think Cam Jansen meets Encyclopedia Brown meets Nancy Drew.)