Math in Our Home

When I discovered this Blog Hop, I just knew we were going to have to get on board. The world of math has always come fairly easy to me. When I thought about how I would teach math to Selena I looked back on how I learned math as a child. My early adventures in math was playing games with my family. My parents not really even realizing what they were doing taught me at a very young age to play many card games, board games, and math was just a subject that was always being discussed in our home. I believe they truly knew the importance of math for everyday life.

I was disappointed when I couldn’t find any comprehensive math activities on the Internet, unlike reading. Even in Selena’s Pre-school curriculum there was little more then number recognition. Both Selena and I were disappointed, with that as she already had a great comprehension on number recognition and counting skills. I realized I was going to have to come up with some creative ways to teach math.

I turned to manipulative, and creativity to begin to teach more math skills beyond number recognition.

This has been one of Selena’s favorite manipulative. I used it to introduce patterns in math. Selena was very quick to catch on to counting the number of the different shapes she needed to make each puzzle. She also enjoyed sorting the colors into piles, then counting them.

These two manipulates have become our most used manipulates to use now. Here are just some of the ways we have used them.

Selena had to finish her number line in random order by placing the correct number under the correct pattern picture.

We moved her number line to another level, and introduced her unit cubes. I was surprised how quickly she grasped the concept of trading in five units for a equivalent rod of 5 then was able to continue building upon that concept.

The concept we are working on now is the introduction to the plus and equal signs and simple addition. Once again Selena has amazed me with how easy this concept has been for her to catch onto.

She uses math everyday to one extent or another, she loves to count everything in the house, or just plain count. She understands more, less and equal parts through different games we play.