Wednesday, March 18, 2009

20 Things to Do with a Hundred Chart

In the Name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful

I just came across this really nice post on the Let's Play Math blog and it answered a lot of my answers. I had been thinking of ideas to use the Hundred chart. I thought it deserved a separate post. Check this out here.

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Miquon Math

In the Name of God, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful

Its been almost two years when I got the Miquon Math complete set along with a box of Cuisinaire rods-my brother gave it to my son. I had started it and then realised he wasn't ready yet. Now I'm really planning to use it as soon as he gets over with his NCERT Math-Magic Book-1, Insha Allah. For the same reason I've been reading a lot about homeschoolers who have used them and how they introduced it to their children. One of the most interesting site/blog for Math learning has been Lets Learn Math where she has given tips to master Miquon Math. The Lets Play Math site has a wonderful page full of Mostly FREE Math Resources.
The Miquon website also has a PDF Scope and Sequence chart.
Deweys' Blog has been helpful in starting out with Miquon through her page Journey Through Miquon Math.

Saturday, March 7, 2009

Learning Math

In the name of God, the most Gracious, the most Merciful

We have been learning Math for sometime. We started with addition and a bit of Place Value, I had got a book called Math Workbook for K2 by Sunrise Publishers. which has 100 pages of Addition and 100 pages of Subtraction problems in different formats. Chusy has finished the section on Addition,I went and bought the NCERT Math-Magic book for Grade 1 and a few other books for reference as well as a MentalMath book. He has been doing about 4 pages on average from Math-Magic and 1 from Mental Math everyday. This has helped him with memorizing Math Facts, understand how many tens and ones bigger numbers have, writing numbers in words and grouping objects into tens and ones.
I have been trying to teach him to count objects in groups( 4+4+2=10 instead of 1.2.3,,,10) because counting in 1s is very slow, This has taken some effort because counting appears easier to him right now. I have also purchases the MathMammoth Blue series and plan to use the Addition books now.
I have not been able to start teaching Subtraction. I have introduced the concept but it has not taken off as well as I would have liked due to my own ;lack of confidence. I am planning to read more about it.
Another thing that has got me really interested is Living Math. I'm still in the process of reading about it and collecting Math readers, This is one thing that I think is very important for children to understand how important apart of our lives Math really is.
There are lists that are sorted by concepts on the LivingMath Site here which can be printed as well.

There are book lists available for the math through history lesson plans here with comments that help you decide what is appropriate.

Some vignettes written by the author after some of her reading times that give people ideas of how readers are used to teach even very young children over here.

Also. there is a wonderful living book that you can find for free on Google Books!
Its called "Number Stories of Long Ago" available in PDF format and a charming little book called "Work and Play with Numbers" for the very young.