Counting by Fives

Remember last week we learned how to count by tens? If you missed the post you can see it here. After this excercise I caught Selena counting 5, 10, 520, (five twenty) so on up to one hundred. I went to my bin of bottle caps and had enough blue caps to make the numbers 1 – 9 and an extra five.

We started out by refreshing our memory on how to count by tens. Which Selena hadn’t forgotten one bit, she went right through counting by tens like she had been doing it forever.

We then added the blue bottle caps, so our number line looked like 1,1,2,2,3,3, so on to 100. I placed the extra 5 at the top of the line, and the 0 next to the one so we had our start 5, 10. I then showed Selena how she could move the 5 to make 15 and then move the 0 to make 20. It took her a few times of trying this new concept, but she caught on quicker then I thought she would.

She practiced this for about another 30  minutes, and is now pretty confident in herself that she can count by not only tens but now fives as well.

I am linking this to Joyful Learner’s Monday Math.

Math, Shapes and more Shapes

I mentioned earlier in the week that Selena had learned how to take a rectangle and make it into a square, then by folding the paper again made a triangle. I thought it would be fun to expand on this new found skill.

We started out with the rectangle and I asked Selena to make a square, then we unfolded it and I asked her how many squares make a rectangle? We used her pattern blocks to help her understand this concept easier.

I then asked her to refold the paper and make a triangle out of it. Again we unfolded the paper and I asked her how many triangles were made from the rectangle?

She quickly placed four triangles on her piece of paper, so we counted one rectangle, two squares and four triangles.

We found a diamond shaped pattern block, and it didn’t take Selena long to figure it would take two triangles to make a diamond.

I then took the hexagon, and asked her how many triangles it would take to make this shape. She struggled a bit with this one, so I got her started, basically just showing her how to place two triangles to begin her pattern, she then finished and determined it would take six.

We continued on with the trapezoid shape. Selena was beginning to get tired of this, but I urged she at least try to finish this one. Again I asked her how many triangles it would take to make her trapezoid.

She got two on there, and quit, I asked her if she could fit one more on it. She looked and examined it for a minute and decided that she could indeed get one more triangle on the trapezoid. Though they moved around a bit under her little fingers, she did observe that she could fit three triangles on this one trapezoid.

Selena had fun trying to guess the amount of triangles she would need, then trying to see if she had guessed right. I know this will be a definite exercise we will do as often as she will work with it. I personally was never great with geometry, so it is my hope that by starting young, Selena will be better in geometry then I was.

I am linking this up at Joyful Learner, come and see what other families are doing in math.

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.

Simple Addition

Today I decided to introduce a little more formal addition to Selena. She basically understands the concept through her counting that when she has more then one item she can count to see how many there are, but to really see the equation was a totally new concept for her.

These were my supplies:

Then I took a piece of white poster board and a black marker.

Selena first was introduced to the plus and equal signs. We started out with the simple 1 + 1 = 2 and went up from there. I put the cubes where they belonged on the addition side, Selena then had to tell me how many total there were and put that many behind the equal sign. As she did this I wrote the equations on the poster board.

We then took our poster board, and using the same skills we just worked on, Selena had to  make each math equation using the cubes.

I felt that this went very well, for her first attempt at some simple math. I am going to use a larger piece of poster board and make a math chart for her with the equations, well as many as I can fit on it, then we can practice this weekly and see how far she gets. We will also use this new found skill in practical life as well.

Tuesday Math

We were given some new school materials from some friends of ours this week. We have new reading materials, from Abeka first readers, that I believe we will use along with progressive phonics (maybe). A complete set of Rod & Staff Reading for levels 1 – 6, well I have to order the level 1 handbook.

Today we explored the math manipulatives that they gave us.

This is a 300 piece Linking Cubes. Being different colors one can use a color to represent the unit 1, put a different color together to represent the unit 5, and so on. A great tool for teaching grouping and beginning addition and subtraction.  We used our Number 0-25 flash cards with the Linking Cubes today.

I laid out all the picture cards from 0 through 25 across the floor. Selena then had to place the coordinating number below each picture. I took this a step further and incorporated the Linking Cubes. Selena did great with 0 – 4. We used the white cubes to represent the unit 1.

When we got to 5 I laid out 5 white cubes and one yellow rod which had 5 cubes in it. We examined the yellow rod and counted the number of cubes. Selena came to the conclusion it would be easier to just use the yellow rod instead of counting out the 5 white cubes. She proudly placed that on the picture of 5 cars.  We proceeded from there and Selena quickly picked up on the idea of using the yellow rods then adding the correct number of white cubes to make the numbers up to 9.

When we got to 10, we compared 10 white cubes with 2 yellow rods to one orange rod that consisted of 10 cubes. Selena quickly jumped to the conclusion that it was easier to use the one orange rod instead of 2 yellow rods or 10 white cubes.

Selena easily made the transition to covering the two sets of 5 in the pictures with the orange rod and then adding the correct number of white cubes to finish the numbers. When we got to 15 without even thinking about it Selena grabbed an orange rod and a yellow rod to finish her number line.

She got tired at this point, but I was quite proud of how quickly she picked this concept up. We will continue to use these in our math. Selena loves them, and in my opinion they are a great manipulative to start teaching early math.