Week of 3/1/10-3/7/10

Our first week of living math and dropping the curriculum has gone better than I had ever hoped!  The kids had so much fun!  They loved doing math.  That makes it a success this week in my book.  We started the week off by reading this:















Then, we did one of the acitvity suggestions in this book and used silverware to make patterns.  After we finished with that I brought out some playing chips that we use for a family game and I started a pattern for each of the kids to finish independently.  After they finished that they made up their own patterns.  Something so simple, and yet the kids loved it!
















The next day I thought that we would work on number recognition and writing our numbers.  I'm of the mind that I really don't like to push writing.  So, we are kinda late on this, but I wanted to make sure that their fine motor skills were up to par before starting.  I'd hate to frustrate them, and then they not like writing.  So, to practice writing our numbers this is what we did:

That's shaving cream with their choice of food coloring in a zip-lock baggies taped at the top.  I made 2 mistakes with this activity.  I put too much in, and I put the shaving cream too close to the top of the baggie.  What resulted from me doing that was that it was really hard to get the air out of the baggie which made it hard to see the lines we were making.  Oh well, I'll know better for next time.

On Wednesday we had a REALLY fun day!  I printed off these.  And we did this:

And here is what the youngest did while we were doing our math:

I guess she likes math, too!

I added to the lesson plans for that sheet and we did 3 things.  First, we used the m&m's to count to 30, then we sorted them into colors.  After they were sorted into colors we did some patterning and lastly we did the graph.  I bought an extra bag of the candies and split them between all of my kids in their own small bowls before we started so that they weren't tempted to eat their "math".  Look at how many different concepts we covered so easily!

I printed out some dot-to-dots for free online.  My children have been struggling with number recognition past 7, so I printed off some free ones that only go up to 10.  I thought that I would put them in a folder and give them to the kids to have fun with this weekend.  A couple of the pages that I printed off only go up to 5, but I thought that it would be a good confidence booster.  Here are links to the sheets that I printed off:

http://www.abcteach.com/directory/fun_activities/dot_to_dot/

It was a crazy week with our move, so we are cutting the week short, but we will be working on writing the number 4 in our salt boxes tomorrow. 

This week's failures (or something like that):

We are in the middle of moving, so we weren't able to get as much done as I had hoped.  I have all of these grand ideas, but sometimes it just doesn't work like that.

I bought a set of tanagram blocks and an animals patterns book from Sonlight, but when it came in the mail the book is really for older kids.  That was disappointing.  I'm trying to find some free tanagram puzzles online that will fit our blocks.

I'm starting to feel somewhat "behind".  I'm working hard to fight those urges.  My kids are only 4 and 5!!!  how behind can they actually be?  I'm such a planner that this whole "fly by the seat of my pants" thing is hard sometimes.  When I start incorporating the Singapore I think that I will feel more organized.