Shake Your Body and Learn Division!

Learning Division through Dance

Get up out of your seats and stretch your muscles! It’s time to learn division. When the kids have sat there just a bit too long and need a chance to move around, why not practice division? Have everyone stand up. Reach your hands up in the air and shake your right hand as you count to 8. Shake your hand eight times, then the other hand 8 times, then each foot and then say cut. Use your hand to cut the air in half. Then start with your right hand shaking it four times, other hand 4 times, then each leg ending with a cut. Now shake each one two times. A kinesthetic approach to learning division facts is a fun way to shake your sillies out while staying on task and learning.

After starting with 8 quite a few times, try 16. Later on try 12, 6, 3 or 20, 10, 5.

Be sure to check out Skip Count, Skip Count, Count by 2’s for more hands-on, kinesthetic activities for learning math.

Cooperative Board Game teaches about Natural Backyard Habitat

Max the Cat cooperative Board Game

Max the Cat is Hungry! Scurry, Climb or Fly for your Lives!

Max the Cat: A Cooperative Board Game

While blue jays sing in the trees, chipmunks scavenge for nuts and seeds, and mice do what mice do, a fat old cat named Max finds his way out the door of his house.

His owners have only so many treats to get him back inside, and Max is a quick treat-eater. Can you distract Max long enough for the woodland creatures to get safely home?

Watch out– Max is hungry!

This fun cooperative board game will help children understand about the natural relationships between cats and the small woodland creatures living in your backyard.

Fractals, Googols and Other Mathematical Tales by Theoni Pappas

Fractals, Googols and Other Mathematical Tales by Theoni Pappas

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
The beginning of Fractals, Googols and Other Mathematical Tales reminds me of Flatland A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott. It begins with a 3 dimensional cat landing in a 2 dimensional world but Fractals, Googols and Other Mathematical Tales quickly goes on to other mathematical subjects. From Mobius Strips to Fibinocci rabbits, tangram cats, and the invention of the decimal point, this is a fun read aloud that will get you thinking about, experimenting with and enjoying math in a fun, hands-on, creative way. Great book for middle schoolers and especially homeshoolers of that age.

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More wonderful ideas for exploring math with teens can be found at The Fun and Games of Pre-Algebra.

ThinkFun Hoppers: Fun, Educational Game – Stocking Stuffer Idea

ThinkFun Hoppers Frog Game

When I was looking for stocking stuffers for my frog loving children the other day I ran across ThinkFun Hoppers.

ThinkFun Hoppers is a fun, educational game that my kids love to play anytime, anywhere and the case is so compact that it can be slipped into a Christmas Stocking. My kids love this game.

I include in my Frog Unit Study. The kids love to play with these little frogs as they hop over eachother from lilypad to lilypad.

ThinkFun Hoppers comes with a lilypad covered pond, a pond full of green frogs and a single red frog. There are cards that can be used to set up scenarios for jumping to eliminate all the green frogs. The cards go from easy to hard. My kids love challenging themselves to try to do all the cards in as short a time as possible.

ThinkFun Hoppers can help children who are beginning to understand addition and subtraction as they add frogs to the pond and subtract them while playing the game.

ThinkFun Hoppers and Multiple Intelligences

Kinesthetic: The movement of the frogs and the action of placing the frogs on the board helps to reinforce their sense of the mathematical concepts of addition and subtraction.

Visual: Cute frogs and appealing lilypads attracts visual learners to the ThinkFun Hoppers game while seeing the actual number of frogs change as they are added or removed helps visual learners.

Auditory: I ask my auditory learners to work with a partner to talk about the number of frogs on the board as they are added or subtracted. Hearing the information aloud reinforces the mathematical concepts for them.

A Parking Garage: A Christmas Present for Children of all Ages

When my son turned three he loved cars, trucks and buses so I showed him how to play the fill and dump game with cars and a garage.

My son loved to play with the Fisher Price Garage making the cars go down the ramp and then chasing after them as they rolled across the floor. Now from reading recent reviews from those who have bought recent versions of the Fisher Price Garage I  discovered that it has drastically changed since my kids were little so, I looked around for a garage that is better constructed.

I was looking for a garage with the features of the old Fisher Price Garage,

1. Durable

2. Could be used with Matchbox Cars

3. Cars could  speed off the end of the ramp and run across the floor.

It seems that Fisher Price no longer makes them but my favorite company, Melissa and Doug, does.

The great thing about the Melissa & Doug Deluxe Parking Garage is that it has all those qualities. It is durable, can be used with Matchbox cars, and the cars go speeding off the ramp and across the floor.

As a toy,  the  educational value of the Parking Garage continues to grow with your child.

When my children were about 5 or 6 we played a game of racing the cars down the ramp and measuring how far each one traveled across the floor. We used Masking Tape to remember how far each car had gone, wrote the color of the car on the tape and ran several trials. Until they knew how to spell the color words, I posted a Car Color Chart.

As my children got even older they started making cars using Legos.  They found that the parking garage was the perfect way to test out their designs. You probably already have plenty of Legos around the house but did you know that you can buy Legos Wheels and Axles to turn all those bricks into cars, trucks and buses?

Now that I have teenagers, they have moved on to LEGO Mindstorms NXT 2.0 where they build, program and test robotic cars. Still they continue to pull out the Parking Garage. They still find it one of the best ways to test out their vehicles.

There are lots of activities for preschoolers related to the transportation theme.

Hands-on, High School Geometry

As homeschoolers, we look for fun, creative ways to learn. This year we are studying high school geometry and wanted to share with you some of our favorite resources.

String, Straightedge and Shadow – The Story of Geometry by Julia E. Diggins

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
String, Straightedge and Shadow – The Story of Geometry by Julia E. Diggins is one of the books we are reading in order to learn high school geometry. The conversational style and clear illustrations as well as the historical background help to make geometry come alive. We are using it in conjunction with Patty Paper Geometryby Michael Serraand an online site, Learning Math: Geometry, an online, interactive Geometry Course. We have found many videos on YouTube to reinforce the new vocabulary terms that we are using. Finally, we do the chapter tests in a high school textbook to assure ourselves that we have thoroughly learned the subject before moving on.

This combination of hands-on learning resources makes learning geometry so much fun that we look forward to it each day.

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Counting Pumpkins

Too Many Pumpkins by Linda White

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
In the story Too Many Pumpkins by Linda White Rebecca grew up eating so much pumpkin that she never wanted to even see pumpkins again in her life.

One year by accident a pumpkin drops off a truck, the seeds plant themselves and a whole pumpkin patch grows in her yard. Being frugal she must use all the pumpkins so she makes breads, pies, soups and Jack O’Lanterns for all the neighbors.

Not only is this a fun story to read but a wonderful accompaniment to a class learning place value while counting pumpkin seeds.

We used page protectors to cover some of the pages in the book and then used dry erase markers to circle groups of 10 pumpkins to find out how many pumpkins were on each page.

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Results of Unschooling: My Daughter turns 21

On September 21, I spent the day with my oldest daughter at her college. She turned 21 on Sept. 21. We had homeschooled until she started 7th grade and I remember all those times that I worried that we might not be doing the right thing. Should she have been in school? Should she have had more structure or been required to do more conventional textbook based learning?

Our days involved going to the public library, local museums, and historical sites. We read on the subway, in the parks and at the beach. We looked in tidepools, made snow forts and raised tadpoles. We joined other homeschoolers to learn Spanish, Shakespeare, and to put on plays. We learned Algebra using Cuisenaire Rods and Chemestry in the bathtub. We very rarely spent a day in the house and we were learning all the time.

Was socialization a problem? Yes, it was tough to decide between all the social activities available to us. When our daughter chose to attend public school it was difficult to give up all that positive socialization to be constrained by the public school bureaucracy and overburdening homework.

Well, we unschooled for all those years and the results have been that she graduated high school Outstanding Senior from a class of 850+ students and is at the top of her classes at a very prestigious school. Majoring in Mechanical Engineering with a minor in Theatrical Costume Design, her doors are wide open. She has been offered internships both here in the USA as well as in Italy.

I spent September 21 celebrating her birthday knowing that she is where she is because she was given the opportunity to unschool.

Creating a Unit Study on Beavers

Beaver

I like to create unit studies around a favorite book, animal or special interest of the children. One day I read the book Paddy the Beaver by Thornton Burgess. My children liked it so much that we started a unit study on it.

As in the case of the previous comment, I look for activities in each of the classic disciplines and find ways to tie them into the topic of the unit study.

Language Arts:- Reading Paddy the Beaver and other books about beavers. Learn to spell the word beaver and write a letter from the viewpoint of Paddy the Beaver.

Math: We found the average size of a beaver and made an outline of a beaver to size. We found the average weight of a beaver and then filled a pillow case with dried beans so that we could feel that weight. We used kidney beans to represent beavers and a cottage cheese box to add and subtract beavers going in and out of their lodge.

Social Studies: We studies beaver trapping and it’s impact on settlement in Canada.

Science: We experimented with many different materials to try to make a dam hold water.

Art: We studied many different art pieces with images of beavers and then used various mediums to draw beavers. We used these for illustrating books that we wrote about beavers.

Music: We adapted songs to sing about our gowning knowledge of beavers.

PE: We played a game at the local swimming hole of taking turns slapping the water to warn of danger and then everyone diving under the water and trying to swim all the way back to our lodge.

Evelyn

Hands-on Creative Unit Studies for teachers, parents and homeschoolers offered to you by a retired teacher and homeschooling mom. Evelyn Saenz: Lensography of a Teacher