martinzoo

You know one of the things I love about homeschooling?

It’s the opportunity to stop in the middle of what you are doing to follow another path.

As I’ve mentioned zillions many, many times, I really want GB to become more fluent with his math facts. I’m really trying to be patient here.

Really.

I keep having to remind myself that when I was in the 5th grade my parents made me go to Summer school for math because *I* wasn’t getting the multiplication facts down.

Sound familiar?

So, I’m trying to stay patient and offer any way that I can that will help GB in the quest for instant fact recall.

Today I remembered an old program that I bought WAY back in the 3rd grade when GB was first starting to dabble in multiplication. It’s called TimesTales. And I took it out and looked at it and my first thought was that it was too babyish and he would never go for it. But you know what? He liked it! Basically, there is a story that involves each number, and when combined with other numbers the story changes in a way that helps you to remember the answer. For example: Mr. Snowman (8) and Mrs. Snowman (8) must eat [6] snowcones [4] times a day or they will melt. (8X8) = [64] We spent all morning learning it, and by lunchtime he had the facts that they include in the program down pat. The ONLY problem with the program is that it assumes you already know the 3’s and 4’s fluently. GB was wanting to know where the stories were for those numbers.

After spending all morning learning the multiplication facts, GB was in a very proud mood. And I was feeling pretty good about him, too. And he said, “After all this talk about snowcones, it makes me want one.” And my mind started clicking. And I remembered that Aquagirl had given my dh a snowcone maker one Father’s Day a few years ago.

So I told GB, “You know what? You deserve a snowcone. So let’s go make some!”

It was a totally spontaneous moment. And it was nice to just be able to decide to do that.

After snowcones, and lunch, we got back to the math. We worked more on the process of solving bigger multiplication problems, which he can do, but normally takes SO long to ‘figure’ out the multiplication, that he gets frustrated with the time the problems are taking. Having the facts down really helps aleviate that frustration. And hopefully he’ll retain what he learned today.

I think that since we’ve finished our Drug, Alcohol and Tobacco unit that I will focus on math for this week and really push for better fluency.