My eight-year-old daughter’s first encounter with improper fractions was a bit more intense than she knew how to handle. And I hadn’t learned yet how to use the Notice-Wonder-Create cycle to help kids think about tough problems.
Sometimes I wonder how our children survive their parents’ learning curve. It’s a good thing God made them resilient enough to thrive despite our mistakes!
Can your students solve this problem?
There are 20% more girls than boys in the senior class. What percent of the seniors are girls?
This is from an old discussion of the semantics of percent problems and why students have trouble with them, going on over at MathNotations. (Follow-up post here.)
Our homeschool co-op prealgebra class had just finished a chapter on percents, so I thought my son might have a chance at this one. Nope! He leapt without thought to the conclusion that 60% of the class must be girls.
After I explained the significance of the word “than”, he solved the follow-up problem just fine.
Kitten (my daughter) and I sat on the couch sharing a whiteboard, passing it back and forth as we took turns working through our prealgebra book together.
The chapter on number theory began with some puzzles about multiples and divisibility rules.
Back when my kids were young, it was a yearly tradition. The big discount catalog came every spring, full of exciting new ideas for homeschooling.
By that time, we would be tired of whatever books we were using and eager for something new.
I sent the children outside to enjoy the spring sunshine, which gave me time to dream over the tiny-print wishbook. Coffee in one hand, pencil in the other, making lists and dog-earing catalog pages.
So many exciting books and curriculum options, it seemed almost impossible to resist going wild beyond our budget.
The more years we spent homeschooling, the more I appreciated Charlotte Mason’s work and tried to incorporate her ideas into our laid-back, eclectic, not-quite-unschooling program.
We never fit the typical Charlotte Mason mold. Mosquitos and natural laziness limited our nature walks, and our version of narration was much too informal.
But those are just techniques, methods.
What really interests me in Mason’s writing is the philosophy behind the methods. Two points resonated: That we must respect our children as persons in their own right. And that we must provide a generous, wide-ranging feast to their minds.
Striving to live out those principles had a profound influence on our day-to-day homeschooling.
My youngest daughter wanted to do Singapore math. Miquon Red was her main math text at the time, but we added a bit of Singapore Primary Math 1B whenever she was in the mood.
We turned to the lesson on subtracting with numbers in the 30-somethings.
Well, I hadn’t planned on spending my day that way. But one of the great things about homeschooling is the freedom to follow rabbit trails.
While browsing the Carnival of Homeschooling, I found a link to Farm School blog’s article Fib Foolery, which sent me to Gotta Book for his articles The Fib and More Fibbery (read the comments on both threads, but be warned that some are crude) and several other posts, all of which set me off on a morning of poetic fun.
A “Fib” is a Fibonacci poem. It’s based on syllable count, like a haiku, but the lines follow the Fibonacci counting series: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8… Each number is the sum of the previous two numbers.
I knew what I was going to share at our Tuesday Teatime and Poetry Reading that afternoon.
Denise Gaskins' Let's Play Math 