Snow and Settling In
Nov 28th, 2006 by willa
Last night we got snow! So that was the first-priority experience of the day — all of them wanted to be out in it. For some reason, perhaps the colder weather which makes the house feel cozy and closed-in, I have been in an organizational mood. So I organized part of my curriculum closet and also went through all the seasonal clothes to get out the winter wear and put away the summer stuff. I realize that working on something makes me love it more. I bought the Motivated Mom chore calendar a couple of weeks ago — I had been hesitating about it for a long time and finally decided that it was a lot less expensive than paying for even an hour of cleaning help. In that light, it was a good decision and has paid itself off already.
Sean and Kieron did a minimal amount of 3Rs in the afternoon, consequently. Kieron is up to simple division with a remainder now in Saxon 65. We have hit no conceptual blocks at all. As his older brother Liam was, Kieron is a little bit slow on his times tables even now. He can figure them out quickly but is not automatic. I am tentatively deciding to just keep going for now since his understanding is so good. I made him a manipulative with a pipe cleaner strung with ten crystal beads in color sequence to help him use sequencing to answer the division problems. Kind of hard to explain but he liked it and it seemed to work.
Sean is halfway through book 6 of Key to Algebra. We are going through book 8 and then I plan to switch him over to Jacob’s — either Elementary Algebra or Geometry. Unless I come up with something better.
They have been reading voraciously. Clare brought out the Cooper Kids series by Frank Peretti and the Seven Sleepers series by Gilbert Morris. These are Moody Books and definitely not great literature, but fun and interesting. For a few days Kieron was reading all day with a few breaks and Sean was pretty close. I bought these a long time ago when Liam was at the series-reading stage (usually occurs between ages, say 9 and 12, at least in my house) and they’ve gotten quite a bit of use. Not Catholic but Christian.
I would like to start them on a bit of very relaxed notebooking — after reading Cindy Rushton’s book and looking through my closet with the older kids’ notebooks and other bits of memorabilia. We never did it in a big way, and in fact I would have said at one time that we DIDN’T notebook at all but I see that I do it constantly and have since I was about 11 or 12, and my older kids started even earlier — especially Clare. I have notebooks and little books of hers going back to when she was about four. Then we got so busy that I just never took the time to do that kind of thing with Kieron and Sean. Plus I think I read too many things that made notebooking sound schooly and structured — it put me off the idea. But the way we used to do it was just collect little bits and pieces of things and sometimes, make them into a book. We had a book about snails and one about a beach trip we took, with narrations from all the kids (even Sean who was about two then), and many little Lord of the Ring booklets.
I made him a manipulative with a pipe cleaner strung with ten crystal beads in color sequence to help him use sequencing to answer the division problems. Kind of hard to explain but he liked it and it seemed to work.
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I know you said this was hard to explain, but can you try? ;) It sounds interesting and it I know that Jason could use some help with division…
Oh, how I love these glimpses into your day. Thank you, Willa–it helps so much to see how your family accomplishes so much so beautifully. I especially liked reading about Clare’s notebooks. We have quite a few of those amassed over the years, and I would really like to try a few notebooking projects this winter.
Stephanie–
It was like this:
—()–()–()–()–()——()–()–()–()–()–
The parentheses stand for crystal beads and the lines represent the pipe cleaner the beads were strung on.
I had five different colors of beads so I put them in order of color — repeating a sequence.
Since Kieron can skip count pretty well and multiply, but was a bit insecure about division, I thought it might help him if he could think of division as a form of reverse multiplication.
So if he comes to a problem like 56/8, and he doesn’t know the answer, I tell him to calculate 5 x 8 and put his fingers on the bead that represents “5″. Then he can count by 8’s up from there, moving his fingers to the next bead. He finds there are 2 more 8’s to get from 40 to 56 so then he knows that the solution is “7″.
It worked for him because he likes little gimmicks like this (and crystal beads are fun too!)– probably would have terrified a couple of my older kids. But he was complaining that he didn’t really “get” division (though he memorized the tables last year, he forget them quickly over the summer) so I thought this would give him a concrete way to understand division as the other side of multiplication… also to help him calculate these problems he is doing until he has internalized the division facts a bit more thoroughly.
Hope this makes sense! and is of help!
Alice, thank you for the comments! I’d like to write about notebooking sometime, and I’d love to hear more about yours — your family is so creative and inspiring : ).
[…] Willa, at Every Waking Hour, brought up notebooking in her post Snow and Settling In. She said: I would like to start them on a bit of very relaxed notebooking — after reading Cindy Rushton’s book and looking through my closet with the older kids’ notebooks and other bits of memorabilia. We never did it in a big way, and in fact I would have said at one time that we DIDN’T notebook at all but I see that I do it constantly and have since I was about 11 or 12, and my older kids started even earlier — especially Clare. I have notebooks and little books of hers going back to when she was about four. Then we got so busy that I just never took the time to do that kind of thing with Kieron and Sean. Plus I think I read too many things that made notebooking sound schooly and structured — it put me off the idea. But the way we used to do it was just collect little bits and pieces of things and sometimes, make them into a book. We had a book about snails and one about a beach trip we took, with narrations from all the kids (even Sean who was about two then), and many little Lord of the Ring booklets. […]
[…] Still thinking about notebooks …. in an earlier post, I wrote: […]