The kids and I had an interesting conversation yesterday. We were talking about learning knowing no time limits. They had made a comment that we don't do school on Saturday and Sunday because that is just the way it is. I responded by saying that learning does not happen during specific hours. Learning takes place 24 hours a day, 7days a week. Mia mulled this over for awhile then said, "Mom, I have an idea. Why don't we do fun math and stuff from our unit study on Saturdays and Sundays, so we will still be learning but it will be fun learning." I wasn't implying with my comment that we needed to do school-like things every day, but I liked her idea. So we did fun stuff today.
Fun math is the term that Mia uses for living math. Mia dislikes formal math with workbooks and textbooks, but she loves living math, complete with drawing, storybooks, games, etc. This is quite enjoyable to Mia. I have tried to incorporate more living math into our days but the insecure part of me always takes over and we seem to turn back to the math program. It's funny, though, I don't have this insecurity with Missy. I do living math with her all of the time. In fact, very rarely do we use a formal math program with Missy. I wish I could be this way with Mia. Curse of the oldest, I guess.
We have been using Julie's math history lesson plans very loosely this year. I thought today would be a great time to drag them out again and put them to the use that they deserve. We are up to the lesson on Pythagorus. We read the accompanying chapter on this mathematician from Mathematicians are People, too. There is so much in this lesson to do. There is no way that we can get through it in two days (today and tomorrow.) Today we just concentrated on even and odd numbers. Missy and I, interestingly enough, has been learning this concept this past week.
Today we read a number picture book about how to determine evens and odds. I gave each child a dish of beans. I told them to count out 6 beans, then asked them to pair them up. I asked them if every bean had a buddy. Yes, it did. Then that means that 6 is an even number. I did the same with the number 5. Once they had paired up the beans, they realized that there was one bean left over who didn't have a buddy, hence, an odd number. We did the same thing with the teen numbers. We made a chart listing the even and odd numbers.
Then we played a game to instill evens and odds. Each child rolled two dice. If each dice had an odd or even number, then that person gained a point. If the dice each had an odd and an even number then the other person got the point. The first person to reach 15 wins. I got this idea from The Missing Mittens by Stuart Murphy. This is part of the Math Start series. I love these books. They always have such great ideas to teach the various concpepts and operations.
This took us an hour to do but what alot of fun we had in that hour. Hence the term 'fun math.'
Tomorrow, we are going to explore the Pythagorean Theorem and square numbers. I am so excited. I agree with Mia, this is fun math. 