Lamb's Math

While I am doing the updating.....

I have found a few different ways of reinforcing addition and subtraction.

The playdough mats are from here.

Bead threading.

I just put a plus or minus card and a number in front of Lamb without talking and he carried out the instruction counting to himself.

I made a teens board out of cardboard though I have plans to make one that is a little more robust.

and we have worked with the beads a few times.

We have reviewed number ordering to ten and also worked our way up to twenty

I just put the number cards face up in front of Lamb and he works his way through (he does skip thirteen sometimes) and when he is finished I get him to count through the cards putting his finger on each one to reinforce it.

Because he seemed to be streaming through the counting I pulled out the numbered cubes I made for a hundreds board but used a control chart so that it is a matching exercise to begin with, and pushed him up to thirty.

He has also mastered the binomial cube so I will pulling the trinomial out for him shortly

Montessori work

Once we finished our dinosaur theme I thought we would take a little break from a theme. It just so happens that the parcel of Montessori materials that I ordered arrived !!!

I knew we were officially a Montessori family when I realised how excited I was and when Lamb started asking which works he was allowed to do and did he need a mat for this one?

Working on the teens board with beads

Lamb with the binomial cube which he mastered the third time he used it!

He sat at the knobbed cylinder until he got it without making a mistake so I would show him the second one. Now he is working on two together equally as eager to get access to the third tray!

Sequencing

Look like a math lesson?

We used fruit skewers to talk about patterns and sequencing. Until now we have done it with a tub of play buttons that we have of different colours and shapes and with a strip of pictures that I printed out and you place the missing squares but here we decided upon a pattern and applied it to the skewer! Apple, banana, marshmallow....

Lamb thought it was great!

Math

A couple of the math activities that we do regularly.

Until now Lamb has been focussing on building a staircase with the cuisenaire rods and learning their progression  by naming the colours.

Today I introduces the concept of naming them by numbers rather than colours so that we can start to do meaningful equivalency activities with the rods. Here Lamb is working out what the number for each coloured rod should be by counting the 'ones'.

We found this book on halves at the library so I set up an activity for Lamb with buttons so that he can work out what the half of a certain number is. Here is placing one button on each semicircle until all ten are placed at the end of which he says "Half of ten is one, two, three, four, five".

I did a few other cardboard circles to introduce the idea of thirds and quarters too and while doing them Lamb ran to get the pieces of his Melissa and Doug pattern blocks to make up the hexagons in the same way.

Whole, halves and thirds.

Introduction to sums

I simply printed and laminated the numbers, addition and equals symbols, used some little wooden ladybirds that I already had amongst my craft things and cut out two leaves from green felt. I either a)Put the ladybirds on the leaves and get Lamb to find the matching numbers then add them together and find the correct number to complete the sum or b)Put the numbers out and get Lamb to count out the correct number of ladybirds per leaf then add them together.
At the end I get him to read it back to me "Two plus One equals three".