This Year's Curriculum: Math

So we have begun our day with stories of faith, then added a phonics rule to our phonics rule book. Then we read together practicing reading fluency using the Elson readers and looked at a facet of Ancient Egypt by listening to Peeps from Many lands Ancient Egypt by James Baikie while coloring. Now, we spend some time with math. We have three facets to our living math adventure: learning the Japanese abacus, learning about Mathematicians, and playing math games. I

The Abacus is a fun way to do math my kids tell me. They love moving the little beads around and I love only having one math manipulative, it makes math so simple. We began learning the basics of the abacus last year so this year we will be applying the use of it to doing math problems and becoming more habitual in our use of it. We are using this abacus and these books to get us started. When we started up with this I wasn't very savy about how to use one but as we went through the books together I have been learning right along side of my kids. Check out this video about the abacus:



Our aim is not to reach such fantastic feats but I felt that the abacus would provide added interest to math as we head into the books in a year or two. My boys (all boys?) seem to have itchy fingers. Since the abacus involves the eyes, the fingers and the ears (clicking) it brings in more senses for the brain to remember the figures and facts as they are performed. It also keeps them busy moving things around not just writing answers on paper with a pencil. So we are having fun learning to use one.

This little book will provide some history about he abacus:

We will also be learning about mathematicians from Mathematicians are People Too vol. 1 and vol. 2. stories from the lives of great mathematicians. We may just narrate these verbally or use notebook pages to create a little book of people who loved math. Jamie has free NP here for Vol. 1 and Betsy at Notbooking Nook has some free NP for Vol. 2 .

Our week starts with work with the abacus then we alternate between working with the abacus and playing a math related game. The last day of each week is Mathematician day.

After math we move on to Reading Made Easy reading lessons.