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!

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!

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!

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!

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.  Here’s a post from last year about how we used M&M’s to do all sorts of graphs.  This year, we did some candy graphing, but not quite as in depth as last year.

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!

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 cemtimeter 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 measurments.

Finally, we used Melissa’s idea of creating leaf bursts for an art activity to add to the nature notebooks.

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  (I’m thinking of tying this into a nature study day??)

~Coordinate Graph Jack-o-lantern

Go have some fun with math this month!

Here’s an example from Mr. Meyers site.  He has a few more here.

My children have developed much critical thinking from this type of activity.  I’d like to share some of my resources thus far for really great logic matrixes.

Beginners:

Primarily Bears from AIMS (this is a great source for other fun “thinking” math with manipulatives – mostly bears counters)

EdHelper

Older:

Mind Benders

http://schools.portnet.k12.ny.us/~mayerweb/Logic3rd/Web/wmatrixlogic.htm

http://scifiles.larc.nasa.gov/text/educators/activities/2000_2001/worksheets/logic_problems.html

My children love the challenge of the logic matrix.  They also love that they seemingly don’t have to do “real” math when I plop these in front of them.  (If they only knew!)

Using the information sheets that the website provides, the kids had to fill out a chart to show how many presidents have come from which states.  Then, they used graph paper to create a bar graph to show the information from the chart.  Fun activity!

I’m trying to keep up with my promise to show you what some of our unconventional math lessons look like around here.  Today I want to share how I plan a math lesson around a piece of literature.  It’s really very easy!

Like most everything I do, I grab a pencil and a pad of paper before I do anything else because I’m always writing notes.  If I don’t write something down as it pops in my head, it’s usually gone – never to return again!

So with pen and paper in hand, I grab a math book and quickly read through it.  I jot down math concepts and activity ideas that jump out at me.  The more you do it, the easier ideas start jumping out at you, I promise.  Sometimes, I’ll only write a couple of ideas – which means one day’s worth of lessons is all we’ll do before that book goes back on the shelf (or back to the library.)  If a lot of ideas are written, I might plan a few days worth of lessons around the book.

If NOTHING pops out at me, but I really like the book, I’ll do one of two things:

1.  We’ll just read the book together for fun – no math strings attached.

2.  I’ll do a quick google search to see if any good lessons are floating around in cyberspace just waiting for me to grab.

This week we read Sir Cumference and the Isle of Immeter.  I found a worksheet in my geometry folder that sent Mahayla on a hunt through the house measuring the perimeter, area and volume of various objects.

Caleb and I pulled out the one-inch tiles and measured the perimeter and area of things around the school room.  After a while, he tried his hand at measuring the length and width of the objects with the tiles, then multiplying the numbers to find the area.  Finally, he had to use a ruler to find the perimeter and area of many things.

Not only did this simple little lesson create excitement, but it allowed the kids to practice measurement, perimeter, area, volume, mental addition & multiplication and more complex math formulas such as 2l + 2w=p, l x w=a and l x w x h=v.  I could’ve done the same sort of teaching from the textbook, but I’m rather sure this lesson will stick a little better!

A couple weeks ago, I forced gave the moms at co-op the opportunity to try their hands at this process and they were VERY GOOD at it!!  Here is a great list of math ideas they came up with on many various math titles.  The activities are in no particular order – some will be appropriate for little ones, while others will be appropriate for jr. high.  I just asked the moms to pick a book and try to think of ideas that would be good for their own children.

The cute math clip art came from Philip Martin.