Taking it to the street.

Emma has been struggling to memorize her multiplication facts.  She can work them out in her head, but has not been able to recall them from memory.
So we took our math to the street yesterday.  It was a beautiful morning, and the kids had a blast playing multiplication hopscotch, and other variety of games and memory work.

Jack was able to work on skip counting and jumping, while the girls worked on the 3's.

I think that this worked.  Before bed I reviewed the facts with Emma, and she knew them all without hesitation.  

We have tried all kinds of rote memory work for Emma and it just hasn't stuck.  My theory is that when she is asked to do something physically challenging (jumping from square to square- don't land on the lines, etc) it frees up the portion of her brain that was anxious about the math.  She was so worried about trying to remember that it blocked it.  Being physically active distracted her and allowed it to really sink in. 

I'm going to look and see if I can find any literature to confirm this. :)

one article, and another

Moving on to the 4's today!

sound project- string telephones by, Abby & Emma

                               SOUND EXPERIMENT 

When you make string telephones you tie a string to two plastic cups and add paper clips, then you talk to the person on the other side and you can have a conversation. A three way call is possible you just add a third cup, more string and a third paper clip. To hear the people talking you half to pull the string tight to here the sound, If you don't the vibration will stop and the sound won't make it through. ~ Emma

     Today we did a sound experiment.  We made a phone out of string and plastic cups. It worked really well!  The way the phone works is when the string vibrates, the sound waves move across the string from one cup to another.  We also made a three way call by adding one string and cup to the middle.  That also worked very well.  We had a lot of fun doing this! ~ Abby

The "3 Way" call.

Mom's Note:  This experiment was really cool, I had no idea that it would work as well as it did. 

We used just a regular plastic cup, some twine, and paperclips.  

Matchbox Ordinals ~ Math Exploration

Jack's cars raced and we used the finish line results to discuss ordinals!

More math with toys!

"Transformer" Math ~ Graphing Exploration

Jack's first "work' of the day was to bring down ALL of his transformers.  Pretty cool way to start the school day :).  Then he sorted them into different categories,

1.Autobots

2.Deceptacons

3. Bot-shots

4. Launchers

5. Easy to transform

6.  Hard to transform

7.  Weapons

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Then he graphed the results... with some playing and sound effects along the way.

He choose a different color for each bar to depict what he was representing in the graph.

His conclusions when all were graphed was, "Wow, I have a lot more Autobots than anything else!"

Mission Accomplished.

I have found that is it very easy to engage Jack in his work, when we incorporate the things that he loves or is currently interested in.  Making him move around the house, gets the "ants" out of his pants, so he will actually be able to focus on his "work".

Additional Reading

Boys Need To Move

Math Exploration ~ Skip counting by 2's & 5's

Jack worked on "skip counting" this week.  To represent pairs he ran around the house trying to find anything that came in two's and lined them up in the kitchen.  (he even had his sisters in line for a while).  Then we counted out loud 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10, unless he started to recognize the pattern.

Later in the week, we started our counting by 5's exploration.  He used handprints to visual 5's.  He was a little hesitant at first to "smooch" his hands in the paint, but after a first attempt by Abby, he got right into it!