I hope you aren’t getting bored with all the fun math we’ve been doing from Hardhatting in a Geo-World.  I just can’t help sharing what has been a GREAT math & science unit!  If you are getting bored, you’ll be glad to know this is the last post!    The other posts can be found here and here.

We did one last lesson on bridges.  This demonstrated the importance of strong anchors for a suspension bridge to be strong.  (Yes, that’s our art table.  We needed to place thumbtacks somewhere and the art table did the job.  Yes, those are baby feet standing on the art table.  He wants to be part of every activity we do!)

We also did a couple of thought-provoking activities concerning geometric shapes.  Do you know if you’re a square, tall rectangle or short rectangle?  We do!  Just measure your height and arm span to find out.  Equal measurements mean you are a square.  Longer height than arm span makes you a tall rectangle, while shorter height than arm span makes you a short rectangle.

And this activity involved predicting shapes when circles were attached and cut in various ways.

As of January 5th, we’re back on our regular math schedule – three days per week of textbook, two days of living math/problem solving/logic.  I’ll continue to share living math ideas, but they won’t come quite as frequently.  Until then, happy math lessons!

Related posts:

1. Math and Science – Bridges
2. Living Math
3. Living Math – Graphs Galore

We are having SO much fun with this book!  A little break from the regular math schedule has turned out to include such exciting math and science that my kids are actually asking to do more. 

Here are some photos from one of this week’s investigations….

Cylinder structures – Using various sized cardboard tubes and homemade paper cylinders, the kids had to estimate and find out how many books each cylinder would hold.  Their estimations and actual results were kept on a data sheet provided in the book.  We then went on to talk about why cylinders are so strong, why certain heights might be better than others and where in creation and the man-made world we find the use of cylinders.

I’ve also recently discovered a wonderful blog called Think! that offers weekly math/science/art related challenges for children.  To go along with the math investigations, I gave the kids this challenge.  Using only 12 straws, 12″ of tape and a pair of scissors, they had to create a structure that would hold an egg at least 1″ off the ground.  No tape was allowed to adhere the structure to the surface or the egg to the structure.  Fun!

Caleb’s structure.

Mahayla’s structure.

Today, math was in the form of a cookie baking day in preparation for our annual cookie baking and exchange party at my mom’s house tomorrow.  I’ll probably post pictures and few recipes soon.  Have a wonderful weekend!

Related posts:

1. Around The World
2. Settling the New World and Colonial Life Unit
3. Welcome To The World

Whether you have extra M&M’s, Skittles, Smarties, Runts, or just a big bunch of assorted candy bars, take a few minutes to turn those sweets into more than cavities.  Even little bitty ones can sort candy, place the pieces on a blank grid, then color a bar graph.  As the kiddos get bigger, all the more fun they can have graphing their candy.  Click here to check out my candy math ideas!

And don’t forget all those autumn leaves!  Make a nature walk even more productive by collecting a sack of leaves to sort and graph.

Literal or concrete graphs are not only fun, but help younger ones understand better what a graph on paper represents.

After making the concrete graphs, my children jotted the information and used centimeter grid paper to design their own graphs.

Happy graphing!

Related posts:

1. Autumn Living Math
2. Nature Study – Leaves
3. Living Math – Winter Fun

We started with a review discussion about the purpose of leaves and why they change colors.  After a bit of struggle getting everyone to pay attention during the discussion, I announced there would be a test later in the day.  (Yep, that meant I had to come up with some sort of test on leaves!  In all that spare time I have, you know.  Lucky for me, I was able to find this quiz online.)  I don’t do tests very often, but it was just the thing needed today to turn their attention back toward our discussion.

Math was next on the list.  Using a few of the leaves each, the kids had to find the perimeter of the leaves in inches and centimeters.  Then had to find the area in square inches, square centimeters and an unknown square unit.  Yarn and a measuring tape made finding the perimeter easy.

The area in square inches was found using one-inch tiles.  A one-inch grid could be used as well.

We used centimeter grid paper for finding the area in square centimeters.  (Simply trace the leaf and count the full squares inside the leaf.  We estimated the half and quarter filled squares to add more area.  For instance, if there were two halves, we would count them as one.  If there was a square about 3/4 full and another 1/4 full, we combined them as one.)

Graph paper was used to find an unknown square unit.  We talked about smaller units making for more accurate measurements.

Finally, we created leaf burst for an art activity to add to the nature notebooks.

Enjoy even more fun with leaves and trees by using:

Related posts:

1. Chromatography – or Why Do Leaves Change Colors?
2. Nature in Art
3. October’s Creation Club – Trees

Scarecrow Measurement Man

Candy Corn Triangular Number Pattern

Insect and Spider Problem Solving

And these are on our to-do list….

~Area and Perimeter of Leaves

~Coordinate Graph Jack-o-lantern

Go have some fun with math this month!

Related posts:

1. Living Math – Winter Fun
2. Christmas Math
3. Living Math

1.) Living math really is thoughtful, meaningful math.

2.) Living math isn’t hard to implement at all.

Here are a few of our January/February activities with links…

This Grab the Candy Game allows the kids to practice coordinate graphing and record keeping.  Valentine Battleship is another version of a coordinate graphing game.

How Many Different Ways Can You Make the Word Snow? is a quick activity to encourage problem solving and critical thinking.  This Heart Paths sheet is similar, but requires an extra “rule” to make the kiddos think a bit harder.

These Candy Heart Patterns are a little harder than they first seem.  I gave these to my 5th grader as “fun filler” and she realized half-way through that she hadn’t thought the pattern through completely!

Glyphs are pictures children make based on a legend or key of codes.  Not only does it reinforce problem solving, critical thinking and organization skills, but mapping as well.  Here’s a link to the Snowman Glyph activity we used.

These Symmetrical Heart Masks reinforced the concept of symmetry, as well as creativity.

This President’s Day activity is going to require charting and creating a graph.

Even this worksheet of Valentine Word Problems is a fun, seasonal way to change the pace from a textbook.

There are a few more activities we’ve done or have planned to do, but I’ll let you find them for yourself at MathWire – an awesome site for living math ideas!

When the activities are quick, I’ll do several in one day.

As for living literature, we’ve checked out this series of books from the library to go along with our Medieval Unit.

Learn more about adding living math to your homeschool with Loving Living Math!

I’d love to hear about your living math learning!  If you share on your blog, please let me know so I can come visit!  Happy math times!

Related posts:

1. Living Math
2. One Grain of Rice Math Activity
3. Christmas Math

I hated math when I wad a kid.  Hated it.  It didn’t make much sense to me, I had a hard time memorizing facts, and my teacher’s didn’t spend much time helping me to understand.  I used to nearly have anxiety attacks in middle school when the teacher put this sort of problem on the board.  “If a train from NY is traveling 60 mph……”  You probably didn’t care much for those problems either, did you? 

I remember my poor Dad spending countless hours trying to teach the concept of fractions to me in third grade, only to have every lesson end in tears and me leaving the table saying, “I just don’t get it!”  Surprisingly, I made very good grades in spite of the disdain for math.  And even though I hated every minute of it, I survived.

Fast forward to my early twenties when I started teaching.  What was one of the subjects I had to teach?  Math!  But, I wasn’t afraid.  I could handle elementary math, couldn’t I?  Imagine my surprise (and my Dad’s) when math actually became one of my favorite subjects to teach!!  You see, I had learned to teach with manipulatives, something my teachers had never given me.  What a difference it made!  I was finally able to understand fractions AND I was able to teach someone else to understand them!  Wow!

So, needless to say, I’m a big believer in teaching math with manipulatives.  There’s a connection made in the brain that allows children (and adults) to “see” math and to understand the why’s of math rules.  I believe teaching math with manipulatives is a key element to making math a living subject. And just why would math need to be a living subject?  The same reason we try to make history or science living subjects – because “living” subjects draw people in.  They give a relevance to learning that means more than facts on paper.  They make heart and mind connections so that we hopefully love what we’re learning.  And they give whole pictures of a topic so the “pieces” fit together better.

Besides manipulatives, what else makes math living?  A Charlotte Mason education certainly includes good books, right?  Math can include living books, too!   There is so much wonderful math literature out there!  I’ve started a  small library for myself (some of which I pictured below),  but most of the books we’ve used have been easy to find at our library.  Below are three websites that list many titles you might like to check out.

My favorite living literature for math lessons can be found here.

Including literature during a math lesson is very easy.  I wrote a post not too long ago about using One Grain Of Rice: A Mathematical Folktale for a lesson in doubling numbers.  Some other very simple ideas would be…

• Reading One Hundred Hungry Ants then using manipulatives to make fair shares.

• Reading How Big Is a Foot? and comparing measurements based on your feet and your child’s feet.  Then talking about the necessity of a standard unit of measurement.

• Reading Alexander, Who Used to Be Rich Last Sunday then working on a skill like money subtraction with real coins.

The ideas are endless, but well worth the thought  because your children will thrive on such exciting activities.  The greatest part is that you probably don’t have to really work that hard.  Doing a Google search on “(name of book) activities” will most likely place activity ideas right in front of you.  Here are some great websites to get you started.

Mathwire Literature Connections

NCTM Ideas

Linda’s Learning Links

For many, many more ideas about how to add living math lessons to your homeschool, check out Loving Living Math!

Related posts:

1. One Grain of Rice Math Activity
2. Christmas Math

I found the activities and worksheets at the NCTM Illuminations site.

After reading the story, Mahayla had to chart the number of grains of rice the raja gave away.  Since the numbers became huge, I let her use a calculator.

Next, she had to determine how many cups of rice were given away on a few of the days, as well as the weight of the rice and number of people it would feed.

Fun math, real-world type stuff, and lots of computation!  Who could ask for more? 

No related posts.