Back to School
Well, we officially started back to school today. We’ve been doing some little piddly stuff here and there, like the dental science experiments and we’ve done some work on our Colonial Life Unit (I’ll get into that in more detail when we’ve gotten further along).
I asked GB if he wanted to change up our routine for a while. We’ve been doing what he calls ‘college learning’ for about a year now. He calls it that because he believes that that’s the way Aquagirl and Jabem work when they are at college. Basically we just do focused learning of one subject for each day of the week. Today was our math day. And GB decided that he doesn’t want to change anything…. not surprising……. he never wants to change anything. He’s pretty into his routines.
We are still working on multiplication. I thought he’d have this licked by now. But his stubbornness extends to the learning field also. Anyway, I think it’s really important for him to be fluent in his multiplication facts before we go any further into the fourth grade curriculum. So we worked on that ALL day today in various ways.
GB’s cousin, Doc Bish (you may have seen some of his comments on my blog before, he’s in medical school, and is much older than GB), gave him a set of Mythmatical Battle cards for Christmas. Those are some really cool cards. We spent about three and a half hours playing that game today…… and we still aren’t done with our battle! It’s really fun, and it really works on multiplication skills. At this point I believe GB is beating me, but it’s really close. Even though tomorrow is Language Arts day, I think we’ll try to finish up our battle.
I also had him play Timez Attack this morning. And we made Robinsunne’s multiplication clock this afternoon. This took a lot longer than I expected because GB must make each square just right. Even the colors had to be a pattern, which you probably can’t see because he used about 20 different colored pencils. We made the wheel out of a foam display board that we had left over from another project. I got the directions for making the pattern here.
So far we have filled in all the multiplication equations that he positively knows. We still need to work on 6’s, 7’s, 8’s and 9’s. He knows some of the tricks for nines, but is slow to spit them out.
So we’ll keep plugging away at this and hopefully one day soon, he’ll think it’s easy-peasy! God, give me patience, I hope so! ;-0
The clock looks cool! Don’t know that I’d have the patience for it, but it sure does make a nice product!
The card game looks really, really interesting! I may have the patience for that!LOL!
Comment by
lapazfarm — January 7, 2008 @ 10:18 pm
The multiplication wheel looks very cool! What an incredibly “tidy” job!
I’m really impressed. My dd seems to have forgotten a little of her multiplication facts over the break. We need to really dwell on that, too! Sounds like you both are doing a great job working on nailing those down!
Comment by Dana — January 7, 2008 @ 11:17 pm
The multiplication wheel looks awesome! I’m impressed that he has taken his time to do a beautiful job. The boys I’ve taught in PS were always in a hurry to finish up and their work was generally sloppy. The joy of HSing, no pressure to be like the other boys… time to really put forth your best effort.
I, too, want to assure that Sweetie knows her +/_ facts very well before we move on to other stuff. She’s getting pretty good. Any suggestions for great activities/projects? I think we are tiring of flash cards, etc.
Comment by Makita — January 8, 2008 @ 10:01 am
You always have such great projects. Believe I will be “borrowing” the multiplication wheel for my kids..:)
Comment by Gerky — January 8, 2008 @ 10:04 am