Yesterday,  we got together with another homeschooling family for a day of math.  As Mia always corrects me:  a day of 'fun math.'   There is a  difference, you know.  Math is adding, subtracting, etc.  Fun math is painting, games, reading, etc.  To Mia,  this difference is huge and sets the tone to her whole day.   She loves doing fun math so she was very excited to have Mrs. K.,  Secret Agent Man and Miss Yep come to our house for a day of exploring the world of math.

    We are using the living math history plans that are found on the living math site.  These plans are amazing.  There are so many things activities to do, books to read and games to play.  In theory,  there are 4 units that are to do you for a year.  The way that we are doing it, though (twice a month,)  it will probably take us all year to do one unit.  The first lesson was on how math is all around us.  Math is not just numbers, counting, adding, multiplying, etc.  Math is about shape,  beauty, art, science, etc.  Math is a huge part of our world:man--made and natural.  We talked yesterday how God is a God of numbers and math.  Numbers are a huge part of the Bible.  For ex.  it rained during the Great Flood for 40 days and 40 nights,  God made the world in 7 days,  Jesus rose again from the grave on the third day.  God is also a God of order.  We looked at nature and how symmetry and order is important to God when  he makes the things of our world, ex: butterflies and compound leaves.    We looked at books to see other examples of math in art and science.

     We made our own math art by painting patterns.  We folded a piece of paper in half a few times until we got to a size that was workable.  We unfolded it.  The kids then painted a pattern on one square of the paper.  They  proceeded to paint that same pattern on all of the squares.  We showed the kids that math is also all about patterns.

    After the art activity we read the book Monster Math and figured out how many monsters were left at the end.  Then it was play time while the Moms made lunch.

    After lunch, we didn't spend too much time on any more activities as I could see some of the kids were ready for our math time to come to an end.  We are working with an age difference between 9 yrs. old and 3 yrs. old, so we need to accommodate both ends of the spectrum.  So for the afternoon portion of math,  we read a book on symmetry:  Let's Fly a Kite by Stuart Murphy.  This book is from the Math Start series.  I love these books for younger kids.   We talked about the book and just what symmetry is, then we had a rousing good game of Dino Math. 

    By this time, the kids were ready to run around the farm and explore.  I was very happy with how everythign turned out.  It was nice to explore this world of math but it is even nicer to do it with another family.   We will meet again in two weeks at Mrs. K's house.  We will then learn about how the Ancients counted and lived with their version of the number system. 

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