Math Gnomes

These were the inspiration for this week's posts about peg dolls. I spent a couple evenings this week working on a set of math gnomes for Blaze, using the 2-3/8" wooden peg dolls. Then we read the first story from the following blog:

http://ebeth.typepad.com/serendipity/gnomes-and-gnumbers-a-mat.html

The math gnomes and the story were a big hit with Blaze! He had already worked on his regular math lesson in the Math-U-See workbook, but he didn't think of the gnomes as another math lesson, he thought of them as a game, as we tried to act out the story while I read.

When I explained to my oldest daughter, Ula, about how the math gnomes introduce all four math processes at once, she said something along the lines of, "Well, it will be a while before he gets to division", but this is not actually the case, because I gave Blaze 10 of the glass aquarium "jewels" that are used as the gnomes' treasure, and he was able to split them up equally between two tiny baskets, so he is already doing division.





Here's the first lesson Blaze did with the Math Gnomes:



He is enjoying this chapter of the Math-U-See Alpha book, as well. It is using a story, of sorts, to teach adding with 9. The story is that 9 very badly wants to be a 10, so every time another number is added to it, it turns on it's vacuum cleaner (children are encouraged to make a sucking noise at this point) and it sucks up one unit and turns into a 10. Each problem on the workbook page is acted out using blocks.