Bunny Hop Addition

Recently, Nikki has fallen for the game Snakes and Ladders in a big way. Except we have to use bunny counters and hop to each space, rather than the boring counters the game came with. This is a great opportunity for us to work on two aspects of Maths: recognizing the numbers on dice, and addition.

We use two dice to play, and for every turn Nikki must add the sum of the two dice to figure out how far each player can move. Since he is still in the early stages of learning addition (he understand the concept of "some" and "some more" type problems but has yet to figure out about counting on from any number other than 0) I came up with a cunning plan to get him adding all by himself:

I made a number line 0-12 for a third bunny. Nikki has to identify the number on the first die and hop the bunny along to that number on the line, then he identifies the second number and hops the bunny along that many more spaces and the space the bunny lands on is our answer.

Bunny needs to hop on three more spaces to find the answer...

Simple and effective, we are slowly learning all the addition variations possible from 1+1 to 6+6 and having a laugh at the same time!

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Our Pre-Reception Class Curriculum

Since Nikki is going to be home with me all year, I thought it would be best to make some plans about what we are going to do. Curriculum is quite a strong word for what we will be doing, but 'vague plan with a couple of textbooks' just doesn't sound very professional!

There are four key subjects that I want to cover this year: Maths, English, Russian and Music. I have not made any proper plans for any other subjects, though we will certainly be covering other subjects in an informal way. I want to keep the formal stuff for the mornings and have afternoons free for outdoor play, arts and crafts etc.

So, here's my plan for now:

Maths.

I want to re-start our work with Saxon. I don't know how I really feel about this book, since it goes so painfully slowly and Nikki already knows a lot of the material, but since we can do a lesson in 5 minutes I thought it would be a nice pain-free way of including Maths into our daily routine.

I also have a collection of Montessori materials, board games and other Maths-related activities and hope to play at least one of them every day.

English.

Reading: we haven't really made any progress with reading lately. Reading Eggs got too difficult (not reading-wise, but in terms of computer and coordination skills) and so we didn't pay for a subscription and haven't had much luck progressing beyond CVC words. For this year, I have bought a new book, designed for early readers, called The Reading Lesson. I am impressed with the format (despite American spelling) and it promises a second grade reading level in 20 lessons. The lessons should take around 5-10 minutes and be covered in 1-2 weeks each. So we might even finish it this year if Nikki can get over his fear of reading sentences!

Writing: We have our amazing writing course Write from the Start. I am completely in love with this program because it is completely focused on fine motor control in a fun way. The worksheets take literally a couple of minutes - I swear he takes longer choosing his pen colour than actually doing the work! We will practice letter forms separately (jumping straight into cursive) and I hope to get to the point of writing words this year, too!

Story time: The most time-consuming part of our Language curriculum! I am currently putting together theme packs of 5 books to do a Five in a Row type reading program. The plan is, simply, that I will read the same five books every day for a week and we will talk about the books and find more themes and deeper understanding over the course of the week. I will probably use these books to base our arts and crafts and science experiments on, too.

Russian.

Nikki will be going to Russian school again this year. I also plan to make Russian lessons a part of our daily routine.

Reading and Writing: Use a combination of his school reading textbook and games to learn the letter sound and forms. I want to use last year's textbooks for daily Russian practice. His class is progressing to multi-syllable words this year, which means he might actually be reading fairly well in two languages by the end of the year! (Russian is much easier for learning to read because you just learn 33 letters - no funny rules or letter pairs making completely different sounds, there are only a very few exceptions)

Comprehension: Again, use games and his school language textbook to revise and get the topics into his active vocabulary.

Story time: Same as for English, except the goal is more to encourage understanding and narration than discussing themes, since someone is reluctant to actually speak in Russian.

Music.

This is our final set subject. Nikki is so musical that I really want to make it a daily lesson. We have our Little Musician lessons for theory and Soft Mozart for learning the piano. I have no goals other than to keep him loving music and getting familiar with the sounds of notes and instruments, and maybe learn a couple of musical terms.

Nikki is reluctant with piano lessons - he likes to play as if he's in a band, dancing to the music and pretending to play a tune. Very occasionally I can stop him for about 30 seconds of practicing "proper" playing techniques (finger exercise or note-recognition games). The best I can hope is that he picks up a couple of bars of Jingle Bells in time for Christmas!

The End.

So there's my vague plan / curriculum for this September. My goal is to do lessons in Maths, Reading, Writing, Russian and Music for at least 5 minutes every day. That is maybe half an hour plus story time before lunch - not too much for a nearly-4 year-old, I think. Story time will probably need a maximum time limit to fit everything into the morning, though...

Lesson Packets

We haven't done much structured learning so far this year. Between perpetual colds, three chest infections and a bout of the 'terrible threes' neither of us has been much in the mood for sitting down learning.

Since starting Russian School, though, Nikki has once more started asking me for lessons. As we haven't done much for a while and I am only now getting over a generously donated cough/cold bug, I didn't want to put too much energy into planning work that he might decide is 'boring' very quickly!

So, I printed out some alphabet/phonics, shapes and maths worksheets from 1+1=1 and filled 26 plastic wallets with them. I then ripped up a couple of colours/shapes/counting workbooks that I have been meaning to use with Nikki for months and stuck a page or two in each wallet. When he asks me for a lesson, I just empty the next wallet and we work through them.

This method is working out so well for us right now! The worksheets are easily finished in 1-2 minutes each and is mostly revision work but it is getting us back into the habit of sit-down work which is great.

Below is an example of one worksheet we have finished - he did it all perfectly but because drawing circles is so fun we had to circle everything else in another colour. He is making a real effort to trace the letters and is really eager to learn, something that I have really missed this winter!

Bread Pudding

Nicholas doesn't like bread crusts. In less than two weeks, I collected over 9oz of bread crusts, simply by removing the edge of Nikki's sandwiches and toast, rather than have him waste them on the plate. There is only one thing worth collecting bread crusts for - bread pudding!

I really don't like wasting food, so I suspect making bread pudding will be something of a constant while Nikki remains crust-phobic. Fortunately, it is something all my family enjoys, so I won't be having to eat mountains of bread pudding by myself!

I used a different recipe this time, and I probably wouldn't use it again with Nikki because it calls for soaking the bread before "squeezing out the excess water". Have you ever tried squeezing water from soggy bread - it doesn't work. Especially if you are three! My mum said I should have put the mix into a muslin before squeezing, but I think it will be easier to just use my old no-soak recipe in the future!

Nicholas enjoyed squeezing the bread, though! 

He also helped me measure the ingredients (by reading the numbers on my scales - I cook in pounds and ounces, which makes it really easy for him as they are almost always single-digit whole numbers). Once we mixed all the ingredients together he carefully smoothed over the top.

He also insisted in putting it in the oven himself (as he made it). Unfortunately the dish was too heavy for him so he had to settle for pushing it deeper into the oven and closing the oven door.

The end result looked (and tasted) great, but since Nikki decided to invite Grandma over for afternoon tea to taste-test his masterpiece, I completely forgot to take a picture of the finished pudding! 

Saxon K

Since we took a fairly long break over the holidays, we have only covered 27 lessons in Saxon so far. As we have progressed a bit further than my initial review, I thought I'd share my views on the program so far.

It is slow. Almost painfully so. It is written as a textbook for six year olds, and so far there has been nothing more difficult than counting to ten. We have only just started out with introducing the concepts of addition and subtraction, and even then it is in a vague, story-telling way.

I can't imagine using this program with a six year old.

As it is, I manage to complete each lesson with Nicholas in 10-15 minutes. Almost half of that is spent doing things not dictated in the book (such as reinforcing the pattern of the 'month' - currently using aeroplane counters; it can take 5 minutes to 'land' them all in the right place) or simply playing with the manipulatives.

I know he is only 3, but I feel like the lessons are too slow even for him. He really enjoys his maths time (and often reminds me if we don't do it first thing) but I think that he might lose interest if the pace doesn't pick up.

To give you an idea, one lesson from this week went something like this:
Watch me choose four counters in one colour and four in another and make an AB pattern. Your turn. Repeat two more times. End Lesson.

So, I'm going to try doing 2 lessons back to back, so long as I feel he is in the mood for another lesson when we have finished the first. This shouldn't add much more than 5 minutes to our maths session, but the increase in pace should challenge him enough to keep his focus.

Don't get me wrong, the book is thorough and has enough repetition to make sure each concept is mastered, but it seems most suitable for preschoolers, and even then the pace is questionable. The topics covered are mostly making patterns - with coloured counters or pattern blocks - and mastering recognising numbers to ten, counting with one-to-one correspondence, in fives and tens. Most of this I have seen in workbooks aimed at the 3-5 age group.

I will keep on with Saxon, since Nikki enjoys it. It does look like there will be some more challenging concepts coming up in a couple of 'months', like introducing the value of coins and using a ruler.

So that this post isn't entirely boring, here's a picture of Nikki practising graphing with dinosaurs:

Note: The textbook is designed to cover 12 lessons each month. When I write 'month', I am referring to a group of 12 lessons, not a calendar month. 

English or Maths?

I sometimes get the feeling I am going about this Early Learning thing all backwards.

Almost everyone focuses on reading. It is easy and most of the people who teach their child before school enjoy reading themselves. I love reading. I also love Maths. It has always been more important to me that Nikki love maths, because it is so easy not to.

Fortunately, Nikki is a Maths-y child. He has always loved numbers and counting. Encouragement is really not necessary - he begs me for his lessons! So our main educational focus has become Maths.

Unlike most early learners, Nikki can't read. He sounds out CVC words (which I have to remind myself is more than most children his age can do) but has shown no interest in memorizing sight words. Thus, if you give him a book he won't even try to read it.

This frustrates me, since I have done a lot of sight-word reading flashcards (primarily using LR) and he never shows any memory of words that I know he's seen HUNDREDS of times! (Unlike all the other children who read books at 2) So we're doing occasional Reading Bear and going through the motions of Little Reader and I'm planning lessons around a more traditional reading primer with the hope that it will make a difference.

So, for now, Maths is Nikki's choice. He is progressing easily through Saxon K and at this rate will be finished with the elementary textbooks before he starts school!

All I can do is pray that he'll be reading sentences by then, too!

Patterns

At the start of every lesson in Saxon K, we revise the pattern of the month. This is currently an AB pattern with green and orange.

Nicholas immediately memorised the idea of a green-orange pattern. He could recite it over and over, but struggled at first to reproduce it. The pattern revision in Saxon is restricted to colouring the next square in the right colour for the pattern. This wouldn't have been enough for Nikki.

We do three exercises to revise the pattern. First, I printed out a table with 6 columns and 13 rows. This is our pattern sheet, as the pattern changes after 12 lessons. I coloured the first row in as a reminder of our pattern and numbered the other rows 1-12.  This is also how I keep track of which lesson we are on.

Nikki colours in one row every lesson - spot the one where I helped him! He rarely makes mistakes (usually when he's not paying attention to which pen he is holding or which square he is colouring).

We then have a handful of linking cubes in green and orange that he makes a tower with - this one gets skipped sometimes because he struggles to link the cubes on his own. He then separates the linking cubes and sets out 'garages' in a green-orange pattern, in front of which he 'parks' his green and orange transport counters. This is, of course, the best bit.

When I was choosing the vehicles, I picked them out at random. I didn't want there to be a clear set of all the same/all different - I wanted the focus to be on the colour for this activity.



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Not Another Maths Program!

Yes, I have found yet another maths program that I have started using with Nikki.

If we do Little Math it takes all of 2 minutes and he just isn't all that interested in doing JG dot work at the moment. Because of his current temperament I am not giving him Montessori materials - he would just throw them or find a way to destroy them - and after reading some reviews of the later books in this series (and after finding the teacher's book at a real bargain price) I decided to try out Saxon Math level K.

We are now on lesson 7 of 112 and Nikki is really loving it. In fact, I would say as a maths program for 5-6 year olds it is probably too repetitive and boring. The early lessons focus a lot on playing and getting familiar with the materials. It takes almost the first month to get to counting to ten using 1-to-1 correspondence.

We are not following the lesson schedule - so far Nikki has been happy to do a lesson every day rather than the planned 3 lessons a week. It is very repetitive, which I really think he needs at his age, but each lesson builds on the ones before and the material is covered slightly differently each time (eg. counting out 5 bears rather than 5 cubes).

I am actually quite impressed with the topics covered - every day we practice a sequence (right now it is an AB colour pattern) and we're supposed to do a calendar discussion but I skip that as we already have our morning calendar time. In lesson 5 we drew a pictograph of the boys and girls in our family - Nikki is so proud of his 'family graph'.

It looks like every new thing we learn will be re-visited often in later lessons - I can see the word graph in six of the first 24 lesson titles, for example. This should make sure that he gets a thorough understanding, rather than forgetting the topic when it's done and having to re-learn it again later.

We are really enjoying the lessons right now. They are fully planned and scripted. I generally follow the text as a guide rather than simply reading the script, because I want to make sure I am focused on Nikki rather than the book. In all, using the manipulatives to practice our pattern and covering the day's lesson takes around 10-15 minutes. Sometimes it is even less. Most importantly, Nikki loves his maths time. 

Writing Numbers

Calendar Update

This week I have added several new things to our calendar. We now do English in the morning and Russian in the afternoon, because there is too much to do at once! We now have a weekly memory verse in English and Russian, and a letter, number and note of the day, as well as a solfege song, which we do in both languages. Nikki loves singing songs in solfege.

The dinosaur pockets have been eagerly awaiting a purpose and make a perfect calendar-storage unit.

Nikki likes to get involved, so I have made sure there are plenty of activities, other than sticking everything on the board, such as circling numbers on the 100 square and writing the number on his book, finding it on his die and clipping on the right number of pegs to the number card. He also rings the bell for our note of the day and wishes he were big enough to point to all the notes on our song.

The space on the board is for when I finally finish our Russian exercise cards. I found a poem with gymnastics-style actions here and loved the idea, so I have made it into flashcards. The pictures will help Nicholas build his vocabulary (and make it more fun!) and individual cards let us pick a couple of exercises at a time - great for those moments when little boys just need to move!

Tactile Numeral Board

This is a little project that I've been planning about 12 months now... I know I said that I am moving on to Montessori, but I like the idea of combining the quantity within the numeral and will continue to do so alongside the 'traditional' maths presentations.

This board is really a piece of polystyrene wrapped in felt - the glue I have was reluctant to work with polystyrene, so I ended up stitching it together...

The numbers are cut out of felt and glued on - I made sure that the background colours will match up for the Montessori number rods that I am making. Each numeral has holes into the polystyrene into which  Nikki can put golf tees. This goes together with the JG maths flashcards we have been using.

Then Nikki gets the fun job of counting out and balancing marbles (or anything remotely small and round - in this case miniature apples) onto all the golf tees!

The other side will have the numbers 5-9, but I will leave them off until he has mastered 0-4.

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