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.

Today we spent some time on math facts.

Yes, it is repetition.

Yes, we’ve done it ALL before.

Ugh! I’m so tired of going all over this again.

But I must get GB fluent in his math facts. I must!

The first thing we did was work on a great multiplication facts tool. It’s a kid’s freeware download. First you study the facts, then you practice either with a timer, or without. And the timer can count down from a certain amount of time, for timed trials, or you can count up if you want a little less pressure.

Later, we tried this concept, which I saw on the TV show, Kids by the Dozen, on The Learning Channel - great show by the way. On it, the mom, who homeschools all 16 of her kids (seven of whom have grown up and moved out) was working on multiplication facts with one of her little ones. And I liked her concept. Basically, you make a grid, mine was six by four. In each square you put a multiplication problem, for example this grid was working on the sixes. Then on a separately colored paper you print off the answers, cut them out and put them to the side. The child then takes the answers and covers the problems with them. This worked really well, even better than I thought it would. GB didn’t even realize that he was also practicing division with this activity.

GB also has a problem with writing. It causes him a lot of pain when he physically writes. Therefore, we do a lot of computer work. I suspect, although not officially diagnosed, that he has dysgraphia.  So we also worked a bit on his small motor skills today. Last year I got a book called Complete  A Sketch. It’s supposed to hone his dexterity and focusing skills. He really likes this book because it is not overwhelming to him, and he gets good results. At this point, he’s about half way through it.

After a bit of sketching, we headed over to his 5th grade Time4Learning math program. I must say, I really, really like this program. GB loves the cartoons and games that reinforce what he is working on. Today he was working on estimation in the billions. All of this was extremely easy for him.

If only I could get him to memorize his multiplication facts!

This was a fun game that GB and I enjoyed today.

Basically, you print off identical BINGO cards that have large numbers printed in the squares. These numbers have been rounded. We were rounding to the nearest thousand, but you can go as high or as low as you want.

Then on strips of paper, which you place (folded) into a small bowl, you have the un-rounded numbers.

Each player alternately takes a piece of paper from the bowl, rounds the number on it (ex. 33,565), then finds the rounded number on the BINGO card (ex. 34,000). Then you mark your card and put the folded strip of paper BACK into the bowl. The first player to blackout the entire card is the winner.

It seems like it would be a quick game, but we kept getting repeat papers, which is ok because that’s just more practice. This game, as is, was too easy for GB, but it was on the Time4Learning website that we are previewing, and he wanted to play it.

And don’t you think the markers are just gorgeous! I borrowed them from Jabem. He used to use them for his Magic tournaments. Thank you Jabem, hope you don’t mind…

Today we spent more time learning about artisans from the colonial era. It was kind of a dicey day because I got lots of phone calls, I had to do one haircut, and my dog needed grooming.

So GB got homeschool on the fly. When I got spaces, he got educated. And really, I think we learned a lot.

This morning we spent about an hour on Time4Learning’s web site. I’m using a two week trial to see if I like it. So far, I have to say, I am impressed. I think there is a lot of comprehensive curriculum. We headed in to the Math section to see if it was more fun than the ALEKS web site we’ve used for the past year. We did one chapter; reading and writing HUGE numbers. Now GB completely understands how to read the really large numbers, all the way into the trillions. And he really enjoyed impressing his dad at dinner tonight by reading 46,136,720,465,302!

We worked on our Colonial unit, too. Last week we learned about Blacksmiths, Whitesmiths, and Candle Makers. Today we focused some more on some different artisans. We learned about glass blowers, and watched this video:

Then we learned about how important the Printer was to colonists. GB decided that if he lived in colonial times he would be a Town Crier because he’s such a good reader. We watched this video to learn about printing:

And then, while my little doggie calmed himself from the drama of a grooming, we went through this web site from beginning to end. GB loved it. He learned about Captain John Smith’s waterway adventures, and after each chapter he got to play an interactive game. Fun! It took us about two hours, but he didn’t really care. I don’t even think he thought of it as educational. His favorite game was the one where you compare the accuracy and quickness of a gun to a bow and arrow. The gun was slow and thorough, but the bow and arrow didn’t take nearly so long to reload. Personally, I liked the game where you tried to beat the colonists at building Jamestown. They did it in 19 days. I did it in 44 days, and GB took 98! Colonists win, hands down!

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

Using ALEKS for our math this year has been great. GB has mastered 75% of the 4th grade already.

BUT….. he still is very hesitant about multiplication. And as you know, if you don’t have those multiples down pat, it makes all future math problems take longer, and feel harder. The ALEKS program is great for teaching the concepts. But we need to step back and really have a reinforcement day for multiplying. I’d really like him to know these facts easily.

So we started our day with this video. It’s a great video that shows you just how easy it will be to memorize these multiple facts, if you take it a step at a time.

Then we sat on the couch, with a nice fire in the fireplace and had a no-stress, no time limit flash card session. We really tried to work on those numbers in the 6’s, 7’s, and 8’s that he’s having problems with.

After a short break we came back to the computer and played some math computer games. I was hoping that this would help with his speed. We played:

Lemonade Larry ~ this was a nice easy warm-up

Pumpkin Multiples ~ this one didn’t work well, because he was too slow with his facts

Space Racer ~ we had the same slowness problem with this game

Balloon Invaders ~ he had a lot of fun with this game, so I highly recommend this one, especially for boys
After lunch we played a game I’m calling Tic-Tic-Tac-Tac-Toe. It’s like Tic-Tac-Toe except you play on a 5 X 5 grid instead of a 3 X 3. Plus, in order to place his icon, he has to roll two dice and answer the multiplication problem correctly. Once he does that he has to place his icons in such a way as to get 5 in a row in any direction.

We also played these games.

Multiplication Mystery ~ he liked this one because there was no speed factor involved. And at this point in the day, he needed something that didn’t involve a time limit.

and Timez Attack which is a download. But it’s free and the graphics are really cool.

After all this reinforcement, I still think he needs more. So tomorrow, instead of Language Arts, I may have a repeat Math day. Because I really think this is important. And because we can. Since we homeschool, we can do anything! Right?