One of our favorite family traditions for young children is the “hidden present.” Every year, one birthday present is hidden somewhere in the house, with the clue placed in an envelope to be opened after all the other presents are unwrapped.
Continue reading I’m Your Birthday Present. Can You Find Me?
My old blog over at A Home for Homeschoolers (update: a now-non-existent homeschool forum) is having technical difficulties, so I decided it’s time to experiment with something else. I’m not sure whether to try moving all the old posts over here or just to start again from scratch. I guess I’ll just play around for awhile and learn how WordPress works.
Meanwhile, let me introduce myself: I am a Christian, a wife and homemaker, and the homeschooling mother of five, ages 8yo to adult, all still living at home (though not for much longer, alas!) in the rural countryside of central Illinois. My hobbies are learning and teaching math, and reading anything I can get my hands on.
If you have questions about homeschooling or teaching math — if there’s anything about math that stumps you, or has never made sense, or you’re simply curious about — I’d love to hear from you! Contact information is on the “About Denise” page.
[Rescued from my old blog.]
Teen dd looks up from her Geometry book. “Hey, Mom, guess what? I finally figured out how palm reading works.”
Now there’s a career choice I really want to encourage, right?
With some tredpidation, I ask, “Um… How?”
“When you look at your hand,” she explains, “and it’s all covered with scars, then you know it’s time to declaw the cat!”
[Rescued from my old blog.]
Eldest dd had her first calculus lesson last night: derivatives. The teacher found the speed of a car at a given point by using the distance function, calculating the average speed over shorter and shorter time intervals. Dd summarized the lesson for me:
“If you want to divide by zero, you have to sneak up on it from behind.”
Of course, she understands you can’t really divide by zero, but I thought her tongue-in-cheek comment was a pretty good description of the process of finding the limit as delta-t approached zero.
[Rescued from my old blog.]
Well, I hadn’t planned on spending my day this way. One of the great things about homeschooling is that we can spend time following 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. I know what I’m going to share at our Tuesday Teatime and Poetry Reading this afternoon.
[Rescued from my old blog.]
My youngest daughter wanted to do Singapore math today. Miquon Red is her main math text this quarter, but we add a bit of Singapore Primary Math 1B whenever she’s in the mood. We turned to the lesson on subtracting with numbers in the 30-somethings. The first problem was pretty easy for her:
30 – 7 = []
I reminded her that she already knows 10 – 7. She agreed, “10 take away 7 is 3.” Then her eyes lit up. “So it’s 23! Because there are two tens left.”
Denise Gaskins' Let's Play Math 