Posted by Cindy on February 17, 2009
Hubby and I celebrated Valentine’s Day on Saturday, so I decided to do a family Valentine’s Day celebration on Friday. To get the excitement rolling, we ditched the math books and used little sweethearts to create graphs and find the mean, median and mode of candy that I gave them.
We spent much of the afternoon preparing for a special dinner of -
Heart Pizza
Lemon-Strawberry Slushies
and Heart-shaped Ice Cream Cookies
We finished off the night by watching the Charlie Brown Valentine special from earlier in the week. I’m not a huge Charlie Brown fan, but the kids loved it!
At church Sunday, the Jr. Church lessons focused on, of course, LOVE.
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these. Mark 12:30-31
We played some fun games after the lesson, too.
Pinky Linky
Candy Heart Relay
Blindfolded Coloring
Candy Heart Memory Circle
And, we kept on celebrating Monday at co-op with the annual Valentine’s parties.
There was so much love shared that I think we’re all caught up for awhile! LOL Hope your V-Day was special!
Posted by Cindy on January 2, 2009
I meant to put this post up before Christmas break – oops!
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!
Posted by Cindy on December 11, 2008
Our “math break” continues to bring lively and rich lessons! One of the projects from Hardhatting in a Geo-World
concerned bridge construction. We had to make six different bridges and test their strength.
After completing the activity and filling in the chart provided, I had the kiddos show their findings with homemade graphs.
The book talked a little about why some bridges were stronger than others, but we wanted to know more. I found this very cool site linked from THINK’s blog.
We also decided to complete her Bridge Challenge.
Caleb’s first attempt (not so strong.)
Caleb’s second attempt (much stronger.)
Mahayla’s bridge.
Tomorrow – we’re off to do some Christmas problem solving! You can find some links here. Happy Christmas learning!
Posted by Cindy on December 5, 2008
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!
Posted by Cindy on November 10, 2008
October/November = lots of falling leaves and lots of candy. What better to do with both of those things? Math, of course!
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!
