Friday, November 7, 2008

Math

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We've been using Math-U-See for our Math lessons. It is the same math book series that they use at the school where I work, which is how I was introduced to it.
Each Teacher's Guide comes with a DVD of short lessons that the children watch before they start each unit in their workbook. Most of these video lessons are no more than 5 minutes long, but they do a really good job of explaining new concepts.
Blaze finished the Primer book (the first book in the series) last year and we had started the Alpha book, but his teacher at the school had started him over on the Primer again this year, because she said he wasn't able to stay focused and do his math independently, so he wasn't ready to progress.
I disagreed with the teacher's decision, and had a talk with Blaze about what things he was having trouble with in Math. It turns out that he is still very insecure about writing his numbers wrong, because he does still write some of them backwards or misshapen and he hates making mistakes.
For the first few days after we started homeschooling again, we took a break from the workbooks and did number handwriting instead. This calendar was one of the things we did to practice writing numbers:

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(The cornucopia picture was made with the block shaped beeswax crayons. I drew each part of the picture on my paper first and then Blaze copied what I had done on his paper.)

We have just returned to the workbooks, but because the Math-U-See lessons are only printed on one side of each page, I am writing a number line at the top of each blank page. Blaze is now able to do his math pages independently.

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