Math Buster Monday

Monday saw us diving into our new approach with ‘Math Buster Monday’. The children astounded me with the energy they expended, they worked through their workbooks with a will accomplishing a weeks’ work in a couple of hours. Attitude makes all the difference.

They also enjoyed living math picture books, and the the older children settled in for a game of Number Quest. Number Quest is a DK board game, the object is to make the largest number you can under 100. With the role of 4 dice you multiply, subtract, or add to make the highest number, the catch is it can’t be a number already taken. Einstein surprised me with how fast he was at computation.

Michelangelo and Princess enjoyed the ideas in Lydia Sharman’s Amazing Book of Shapes and spent a large part of the morning creating kirigami artworks.

Jelly Bean had an amazing intensive morning with her being totally focused and wanting to keep working long after Mum was tired. She was learning how to read her numbers and associate the correct number of objects with the written number. I had being trying to help her place the correct number of beads under the number, with slightly successful results. Then in one of those ‘rare moments’ it occurred to me that a ‘control card’ was necessary. I hand drew numbers and the correct amount of ‘beads’ underneath. It was an instant success with Jelly Bean continually referring to it throughout the day.

Princess took a little more thought as she hasn’t been interested in maths for some time. After having such wonderful success with Gnomes and Gnumbers I thought I’d trial other hands on approaches with her maths. Theresa’s pictures of her JBug working with laminated maths cards gave me the solution. I made up some laminated maths cards of our own, using problems from her maths book and set her up with her shorts, longs and flats. She loved it! Thank you JBug:)

It was an intense morning but highly satisfactory, I could really see the connections being made and the interest there. We’re looking forward to a Term of Math Busters.