Angel Pie
Melody has been breezing her way through math. We started all the girls in a curriculum that is designed for 1-3 grades. They've all started in the first of 6 books but get to go at their own pace. (Unlike most math curricula, this one starts multiplication and allows for topics as complex as inverse functions in the first grade.) Melody breezed through the first book and is already working in the 2nd. She was delighted to get to start working on multiplication as she'd "discovered" multiplication some time ago, and she surprised me one day when in the midst of the girls asking me several math questions over lunch, I returned the favor with a question that Melody should not have known how to answer.
Melody: ...5?
Me: Yes! Who taught you division!?
Melody: No one
That's kind of how teaching her goes, in general. Our main math curriculum (Miquon) uses "lab sheets" and encourages hands-on math work. One day, she was asked to create her own math lab sheet. Here's what she created:
Sugar Cookie
Lily Beth is our most hands-on child, by far, so I love watching her do math with a flourish with the math manipulatives. She counts the cubes out with big taps from her pencil eraser, and she subtracts by dramatically sliding cubes across her desk. I, occasionally, have to remind her that accuracy is more important in math than speed or flourish though. She is also tickled to hear the stories from our secondary math curriculum (Life of Fred) as the main character is a fellow 5 year old. (She does want to know why 5 year old Fred's drawing skills are so abominable though!)
Below and to the left is a picture of Lily Beth using some cuisenaire rods to work through some math problems, and to the right, she is using some base 10 blocks with a paper marked "Tens" and "Ones" in two columns to work on place value while filling in a hundred chart.
Honey Bun
Noelle has likely delivered the most surprises in math so far. As she's only 4, I was set to start her off with a simple kindergarten math curriculum. However, a week before we started lessons, she started rattling off various addition facts when we were running errands. So, we changed plans and started her in the same curriculum as her sisters, knowing that we had the resources to pull back and supplement with different things as she went. She was plodding along at a pretty steady pace all the way through beginning subtraction, but I decided to pull back for a while once the lab sheets started mixing addition and subtraction problems as she wasn't attending to the operator symbols that closely yet. For now, she's working through various other math problem-solving work during math time.
The next couple pictures show some of the surprises we've had from her in math so far. Here she was after she happily completed her first subtraction sheet:
The next picture takes a bit more explaining. I had given Noelle a bucket of cuisenaire rods and told her to make some patterns while I was working with her sisters a bit. I saw her making this "pattern" and thought to myself, "Hmmm, I guess maybe she doesn't understand patterns as well as I thought she did. Bless her heart." I asked her about the "pattern" she'd made, and she surprised me by telling me to sing a song called "Sugar Cookies" as she sang her pattern. She then correctly sang the notes to the song "Sugar Cookies" as "do, re, do, re, do, re, mi, do, re, do, re, mi, re, do" while she pointed out the notes/rods she'd layed out. She had used the rods as a way to visually display a song! I was floored.
Despite the girls all using quite different styles in their approach to math from intuitive, to kinesthetic, to musical, they are all progressing wonderfully. I am not really giving them grades, but if I were, they'd each get an A in math for the term.
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