more fun with math

What a wonderful school day we had today!!! And, it all consisted of math! 2.5 hours of math! And, this from a girl who is usually complaining about math. Wow!


I had Alexandra take an assessment with ALEKS yesterday as she has been flying through her lessons. Well, she missed almost half of the new skills she'd learned, although 2 of them were really just because she'd made a mistake and not because she didn't understand how to do it. So, I decided she needed more review.

First of all, I printed out the worksheets they have available. What we love about them is that they're only 16 problems long and there is usually only 1 of each type of problem! We'll probably do these 2-3 times a week, but not every day.


Then, we worked on subtraction using a game from Peggy Kaye's Games for Math called "Largest and Smallest", I believe. We've been playing this quite a bit and it's really helping with borrowing. Then, we did some review with money - I just handed her 5-8 coins and she added them up.


Next, we played a rounding game I made up. We played it with a deck of cards, laid out a number, and then drew from a pile of cards that say things like "round to the nearest hundred." She has to round it and write the new number. I do the same and then whoever has the largest number wins that hand. I actually thought it was kind of difficult and was willing to quit, but she insisted on continuing. I think it really helped.

I'd also made up a simple game about writing long numbers. (For example, write seven million eight thousand). I just made lots of cards that said a number (like four hundred or sixty three or nine). We laid out three of these and the first card was your millions, the second your thousands, and the third your ones. You had to write the number out (like 7,800,000) and then the largest number won. Again, not a wonderful game, but it's helping.


We're also working on multiplication and I took 2 cards and labeled one "doubles" and the other "3's." During the day, she had to tell me her doubles (1+1=2, 2+2=4, etc) and her 3's (3, 6, 9, etc) each 5 times and she got a sticker on her card each time she said them. We're going to keep working on these 2 until they come easily and then go on to the 4's. (Or, maybe we'll move on to 1x2=2, 2x2=4, etc)


Well, that's our day! I was just amazed that she kept at it so long and that we had so much fun. I've found a few games online about money that we'll play tomorrow and next week. I'll let you all know if there are any winners!