Elemental Meridian

Last week we continued our math studies with the quality of 3 and the 3 times table. Each morning I told the story of the gnomes (from Barbara Dewey’s math book) and had Martina count the stones in the gnomes baskets. Addition always had 12 in her basket but also had several more hidden in her skirts. Subtraction always was missing some and had less than 12. Division always had a few but because his are always divided (or shared) with Subtraction, he also had less than 12. Multiplication always had more than 12, often 3×12 or 36.

We also did math problems on our rainbow paper and Martina drew pictures of the gnomes and rhymes (from the book Math Lessons for Early Grades)  in her MLB.

Each morning we did a clapping game where we counted by 3s to 36. One of us would come up with a clapping pattern which had us slapping hands together on the 3 beat. Our count would be one, two, THREE! four, five, SIX! and etc. We would then count 3 is three times one, 6 is three times two, 9 is three times three and etc.

Another activity Martina did on her own was to write the skip counting pattern of the three times table on our sidewalk squares and hop them, counting by 3s, forward and back. She also did the 3 times table as she hopped.

The picture above of the white board was simply a writing exercise. She will do a similar page in her MLB this afternoon. We didn’t get to it Friday thanks to a middle-of-the-might ER trip with one of my older children.

We also made a peg board for learning the patterns of the times tables through 10. My daughter traced a plate onto the log slice, we worked together placing the nails around the circle and then I marked the spots with pencil and she hammered the nails in. By the time she was finished she was too hot to enjoy playing with it but I brought it inside and that night she proudly demonstrated to her father how the pattern for 3s looked. (I wrote the numbers with a paint pen/marker.)

This was a really good week for us and our math studies. Both of us had fun and enjoyed exploring the quality of the number 3. We talked about religion; earth, sun and moon; mother, father, child; and other ways that 3s manifest in our world. Much of our quality of numbers study came from Kristie Burns’ study guide.

Links: Please see my math links for ordering information and links to sellers.

The last word in that rhyme is ‘potatoes’.

Our phonogram for this week is -oe. I tried to use more than one phonogram but none of the others were helpful in coming up with a rhyme so I just went with the one. This week we are also working on the capitalization of first names and surnames. Martina’s copy work will come from the story Rip Van Winkle which she is reading independently as her Difficult Reading Assignment for this week. She reads the story in small chunks and I understand that it isn’t enthralling because it is difficult going for her at her reading level but it stretches her reading muscles and that’s the plan.

We are also enjoying the fable of Peter and the Wolf this week.

Today I told her the story of the boy who cried wolf. We then got out our crayons–she has commandeered the Lyras so I have to use the Stockmars–and she followed along as I crayoned a picture of Peter and the Wolf. The picture is her crayon drawing. Tomorrow I will retell the story and then she can write about it for her MLB. Peter’s name will be Peter Shepherd in order to practice capitalization of first and last names

Resources for this week: Barbara Dewey’s ‘Science as Phenomena’; The Writing Road to Reading‘s phonogram cards; and The Natural Speller, which I use for finding words with our weekly phonograms for use in my rhymes.

Most of my homeschooling friends are ‘classical’ homeschoolers. They are all about academic acceleration and excellence. I want those things for my daughter, too, but more importantly I want her to hold onto her magic for as long as she can. I want her to be able to see the beauty in life through her innocent eyes. I want her spirit to be fed, just as much as her brain and I want her to approach everything in life with a soulfulness that I think is lacking in our world just now. Perhaps she can be one of the people who helps create loving change. That being said, it is easy to feel like I’m doing Martina an injustice when I look at the advanced academic work some of these kids are doing! I get all wobbly and find it difficult to hold my center. To remember that I really *am* sure that what I’m doing with my child is the best choice for us…for her and that she is, after all, academically just fine. This trading of ideas is one of the coolest and most distressing things about homeschooling and my friends and I often laugh about this very topic: how we are constantly worrying whether or not we are doing the best we can by our children. Ladies (and Gentlemen if any happen to stumble across this blog!)? We are.

Anyway, on to math. We did a Singapore math course for 2nd grade. It was okay, so far as math courses go, but it was dry and not much fun. Eventually, after a chat with Martina, I ordered the Christopherus 2nd grade math book. It is a wonderland of fun with math. Then I started exploring the internet and found resources and gnomes and beauty and fun and so guess what we’re doing this summer? Yep. Math.

Typically Waldorf maths are done in blocks and that’s what we will be doing, only the blocks will be broken up by trips to the mountains and beach, rather than other lesson blocks. Our main focus is going to be this: finding the magic in math.

Resources you might ask? Why yes, tons of them! Here is my list of links: Christopherus 2nd Grade Mathematics; Waldorf Without Walls Math for Grades 1-3; Marsha Johnson’s yahoo group, where there an excellent files section with grade level ideas for all subjects; EBeth, an incredible blog with a complete math story using math gnomes for introducing the 4 processes. The 4 processes are traditionally introduced in 1st grade but I got caught up in depression last year and didn’t do much at all other than teach my daughter to read and work in our nature journals. This year has been very different and we have managed to cover quite a lot of ground in our learning…I just want to have some fun with math! So we are going to briefly go over the 4 processes, introduced by gnomes.

We started out trying to use squirrels, as is done in the Christopherus book but neither of us really connected with them. A few days ago I was reading and started thinking about those gnomes and decided to give them a try. We love elemental beings and I knew Martina would connect with them as soon as I started reading the story. If you could have seen the look on her face when I uncovered this:

It took just two days of secret sewing to make the gnomes. They are large, 6″ to 8″ tall, maybe taller with their hats. The other things came from our rock collections and wood pile. We used the first in the EBeth collection of stories for math before the big reveal and once we had gotten over the excitement of exploring the gnomes, Martina took out her Roman numeral stones and made a path by the gnomes.

Here you can see the stones with their Arabic numeral counterparts.

We also worked on place value and all four of the processes on a sheet of paper lined with yellow for ones, red for tens and blue for hundreds. I carry these colors over for one thousands, ten thousands and hundred thousands so that Martina can see the pattern and how it works and repeats. The four smaller beads above the Roman and Arabic numerals are process markers. Like the gnomes, red is division, yellow is multiplication, green is addition and blue is subtraction. I place a mixed group of Arabic and Roman numbers on our sheet of paper, along with the process marker and Martina does the problem. Sometimes we use a number of smaller beads rather than one of the larger beads with a number on it. Here are a few examples:

I also make a point of sometimes leaving a column blank so that she understands the concept of zero. If the column is blank, it simply means there is an empty set there, as seen in the last picture here in the second number tens column, 1,103 (I think! It’s difficult to see the numbers.) What you can see is the blank column and the way she had to use the colored beads in the proper amounts in order to put her answer down on the paper.

Manipulatives often make me go to sleep. In this case, we’re having a great time with them. Something about them being pretty and homemade makes all the difference.

In summary, we are going over the first grade math stories briefly but continuing to do deeper work on the four processes. We are not yet carrying numbers but are doing place value up as high as she wants to go on a given day. We are also working on the qualities of numbers once more and in more depth. We are using Kristie Burns’ guide to Holistic or Sixth Sense Math and then moving this kindy exploration into the multiplication tables. It’s a nice re-introduction to the feeling of numbers before we get to the bouncing, jumping, clapping and singing of the tables.

Finding a math program that works for us has been a difficult journey. We both need something fun and beautiful and soulful to connect with and these math stories have all of those things, right up beside hardcore work on the processes. I’m feeling much more grounded and happy with what we’re doing in math now than I have since I bought her a Saxon kindergarden program several years ago. We have found what works for us. Finally.

This is what Martina learned to do today at her ‘away’ riding lesson. She was so cute!

To: Mommy    (I LOVE YOU!)

from: Martina

note: Happy Mother’s Day! This pic is of the hopeful futsher.

The crayon drawing is my daughter’s wish for time spent with Mommy: she on her pony and I on my horse, each of us wearing our red woolen cloaks, riding down a tree lined path.

This is the sweetest, most purely beautiful gift.

(Educator’s note: When I looked at the drawing I was pleased to see that she didn’t outline everything, that she made a golden glow over the background before she drew and that she colored in clouds and what lines there are were applied after she had made the shapes. So her crayoning lessons are sinking in, too.)

We are moving into a new language arts block this week, continuing with the phonogram cards from the Writing Road to Reading.

In addition to using the phonogram cards and a rhyme written by yours truly, I am adding in stories and grammar work with this block. You can find links to the books on my twitter but for reference I’m using Writing With Ease as a guide. I don’t care to use the stories in the book so I am using my own stories and only using the book for ordering the concepts and the amount of copy work. Thornton Burgess’ Bedtime Stories is our reading book for the grammar lessons. It’s sweet, not too long and has everything we need for the grammar level we’re working on.

This week our phonograms are ‘wr’, ‘ph’ and ‘dge’. Here is my ridiculous rhyme:

A phobic pharaoh wrote to a judge

Who took a photo of a wren and a pheasant while eating fudge

made by a phantom with a physical wrinkle

whose wry smile had a pleasant twinkle.

Ha ha! It’s a terrible poem but it has LOTS of the phonograms in it, which is the point. There’s a picture on the chalk board and both the rhyme and pic will be drawn in Martina’s MLB later this week. For now we are discussing the phonograms, reading the rhyme and working on the grammar concepts for the week: beginning sentences with capital letters; beginning names with capital letters; ending sentences with periods. We have worked on these concepts before, so they aren’t new but this is reinforcement and building on what she already knows.

Summer is looming and it’s difficult to look ahead without wondering if I’m right to keep schooling through the time of year when lightning bug jars, mulberries and swimming in the pool are some of my fondest childhood memories. With the breaks we take, both planned and because life gets messy and I drop the ball, we have to keep going. It’s less about choice than it is about responsibility.

We have been in homeschooling limbo for a month or so. My step daughter moved in and the sheer volume of extra stuff was overwhelming. Her overflow took over our school area briefly. But now the stuff is sorted, my allergies and the-cold-that-wouldn’t-end are abating and the social schedule doesn’t have anything stressful on it. We’re back to center.

Today we did our school work, (which means Latin light, math and reading, when we’re taking a break from homeschooling) then I did some planning while Martina played outside.

Beginning next week we are adding Singapore math back into our math program so that we can finish the grade level curriculum; we are also continuing with the Christopherus program which is beautiful and has helped us solidify some concepts. I have seen the holes in my daughter’s math knowledge thanks to the Christopherus math curriculum and am committed to sewing those up ASAP. We’re hitting the maths hard for the next couple of months. We will continue with Johnny Tremain and A History of US; resume our Old Testament Bible block for a 2nd go round; pick back up with phonograms and grammar in an integrated unit that I will share more on in the following weeks.

Outside classes are winding down for the summer so we’ll have more time at home and to focus on some Latin catch-up and hard-core math work.

What do you do during the summer? Do you lighten the load? Stop schoolwork completely? Keep drilling away? Please, leave a comment and let me know what works for your family.

My friends, Shez and Lydia, run The Book Arts Bash and because that doesn’t require all of their massive surplus of homeschooling energy, they also put on the GUESS Homeschool Science Fair. Dreambox is one of their sponsors, which led me to give them a try for my 2nd grader.

Dreambox is fun! Martina had a great time exploring the website, playing games and learning a few things while in the process. I think that Dreambox is good reinforcement for concepts learned in homeschool or school. Dreambox would also be a good addition to a summer learning program while children are enjoying their summer break. The site would help them keep up to date and maybe even moving forward in important subjects like math and English all in a video game type format. What could be more fun?

Giving Dreambox a try is a win-win situation. There is a no-strings, 14 day free trial. If it works for you, then you pay a minimal fee for the rest of the year and if you don’t simply cancel before the end date.

Dreambox, in my opinion, would be wonderful for advanced preschoolers as well as for children in typical school settings through 2nd or 3rd grade.

The idea came from book Earth Child, one of my favorite homeschool science books for 2nd grade.

We filled a jar with dirt, horse manure, partially composted leaves, a few food scraps and some worms. We covered the jar with a dark pillow case. Martina watered it often and we watched it for a week. Bean sprouts grew. The worms moved around a bit. We saw a few trails inside the jar.

Today she turned the worms loose in some tilled up soil. The contents of jar smelled bad enough to make her pale. Vermiculture is not our speciality!