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There's a blogger on the well trained mind homeschool forum who has a blog called "education unboxed". Her videos show how to teach math using the very popular cuisanairre rods. Math u see is a company that sells a math curriculum, also using the cuisanaire rods. If you go to their website they'll mail you a dvd demo explaining how their company teaches math, also quite informative. I found a hundreds square, ten strips, and singles printed on paper. I cut and copied them and have showed my daughter a few cuisanaire lessons, but only using the paper. Really, go look at it though. It's supposed to teach you to think about math without thinking at all about numbers. The kids learn all of their math facts by the size of the sticks, before they get introduced to numbers.
Apple Fractions book taught my kid what a fraction is and gave me enough practice that I can now bake a pie. It also helped his reading because there's only a few sentences on each page, but they're big words. I bought my kid a chemistry kit for christmas from homesciencetools that he's allowed to pour either plain water or colored water around in. That's math, right? At least he's quit overfilling the test tubes when he uses the funnel. I think that's math. At least some Waldorf or Montessori blogs call pouring water around different containers some kind of little kid math. Something similar, we haven't done, is matching different sized nuts and bolts, or jars and lids.
omigersh, i luv, luv, luv this montessori video about the golden beads... never ended up using them. my kids ended up with the old pencil, paper, and finger counting for math. Check out this video on YouTube:
If you want google "base ten blocks", same idea, much cheaper,but not as pretty.
Rightstart math is popular for young kids on the homeschooling forum. They want kids to learn hands on instead of worksheets too. Rightstart uses an abacus and the lessons somehow teach you by moving groups of beads and not by counting either. They also turn the abacus sideways for place value, or something.
That Qubitz game looks similar to old fashioned hobbies like quilting, which I'm sure we'll get to, but my kid is working on his first printed needlepoint on plastic canvass, slowly but surely. I'm just saying if you like the way that game looks you'll like crafting, piecing things togeather too. You can even build things with plastic canvass. There's patterns to get you started.
We have the Mighty Mind and Supermind, Iiked them better than the pattern blocks because they're magnetic. The kids use them on the cards or use them on the fridge. I count them before I put them away. There's 32 pieces.
I'm probably wrong, but I think all those "learn to draw step by steps" we did early on helped out here too, because he's got a snap circut set. The hubby and I have done a project with him twice. Today he did a couple of projects by himself successfully. Is reading diagrams math?
I bought a book Drawing Stars and Building Polygedra, because I thought it looked interesting. It didn't look that interesting once it got here. But my son pulled it off the shelf the other day and enjoyed it. It's all like dots around a circle, and it says to draw a line between every three dots, or whatever, and that makes a star. I found some waldorf geometry lessons that were the same thing, only with color. Google Waldorf geometry, then click on images. The last part of that book is cutting and folding shapes that look like D&D dice. I need to make copies before he cuts them, but cutting and pasting is right up his alley.
I guess it might be more useful to tell you which catalogs we drool over, and occassionally buy from. Educational Innovations, Fatbrain Toys, Toys to Grow, Homescience tools. We have stuff. We don't use it all the time, but it all gets used on and off.
We have the one with the dots and the rubberbands too, what's it called? There's a few pattern books that go with it. googled it. Rubberband geoboard. I would have preferred that old-fashioned craft where you do the strings with the nails and it turns into pictures, but I got these instead. There's a few different boards you need to be able to do all the patterns.
My dad says it's okay, it's the benefit of having kids that you can buy them stuff you wish you had so you can play with it, I mean help them.
Youth lives by personality, age lives by calculation. -- Aristotle on a calendar
How old is the child? There's a great company that makes a ton of little logic games. Rush Hr is a classic one. I'd look it up, but I'm supposedly working.
Rush Hour is by Think Fun. We love their games!! River Crossing is great, too, and so is Solitaire Chess (Think Fun). Also, Colour Code by Smart Games is great. And I second MightyMind and SuperMind - my son played those a lot when he was 3 and still likes them. Cheers, Stefanie
So this is the backstory for me starting the thread:
DS5 is just finishing up his fist year in what will be two years in a mixed 5/6 Montessori classroom. The school is not a member of any of the national Montessori organizations and seems to function more like a rigorous academic type school with every kid at their own pace. We like the school, his teacher and overall we are very happy.
The issue is that we have a 2e kid (maybe 3e if that is even a term). This fall he has two assessments. He will be getting an neuropsychological assessment with the Eides and he will be seeing a geneticist for a strongly suspected connective tissue disorder. The connective tissue disorder could be causing the dyspraxia/dysgraphia type symptoms for which he has been in OT for the last year.
I think his teacher is looking forward to his assessment with the Eides as much as we are. She read the Dyslexic Advantage over spring break and has a dyslexic daughter. She wants to help him. We just all need to know what exactly is going on and how to help him.
He has about six weeks of the spring semester left and will be attending summer school.
I am looking for suggestions for his assignment sheet that don't trip up his weak areas so much until we know what is going on. Something he can do independently that his teacher could check when he completes it.
My sons have puzzles that consist of 91 coloured tiles in a different coloured columns. Each column has in one case a different set of addition fact (question on one side and answer on the other) or on the other puzzle multiplication tables. They are nice to look at and handle and you can see the patterns you might otherwise miss. I got them in NZ but i saw a link for a similar (10*10 instead of 9*9) at amazon.
