I had intended for DJ to do more static addition to be sure he understood it but he started a problem while I was making breakfast and he misread the number. The font I used for the numbers has a little dash at the top of the 1 and he confused that with a 7. He was already beginning to combine the two sets of stamps to get his answer when I noticed it. But I shouldn’t have worried, he did the exchanges without any hesitation. 

The 5 & 7 gave him 12 unit stamps. He exchanged 10 of those for a ten stamp and then wrote 2 in the unit column. Then he had 4, 5 & 1 ten stamps which added up to 10, so he exchanged all of those for a hundred stamp and wrote 0 in the tens column. For the hundreds he had 2, 2 & 1 so he wrote a 5 and finally he wrote a 9 in the thousand column. You can see he mistakenly wrote an 8 first (which he still struggles with) and then he erased it and wrote a sideways 9. We’ll do some more dynamic addition before moving on to subtraction and multiplication. 

In the meantime he is moving forward with his linear counting. DJ did the hundred chain just before Christmas and is immensely proud of being able to count to 100. But he has tried the thousand chain 3 times since then and he just can’t get past 300 or so. The enormity of the task is too much for him. I had thought to wait for awhile because the albums I use say to do the thousand chain before any of the other chains. But my husband recently finished our mini bead cabinet and I found DJ looking longingly at the chains day after day just itching to get his hands on them. 

I chose to present the #5 short chain first. The short chains are all the square of the number so this one is 25 beads long in five sections of 5 beads each. He has labels for 1-4 and then for 5, 10, 15, 20 & 25. After labeling them, he practiced skip counting by 5’s. I encouraged him to keep practicing by telling him I had a money game for him to play when he could easily skip count by 5’s up to 25. Next he’ll do the #5 long chain, which is the cube of 5 or 225 beads long and skip counting with that chain will help with his clock work as we start to look at times like 7:05 or 2:45. 

After his work with the hundred chain, DJ immediately knew to fold the chain to make a square. We compared it to the bead square and counted the beads on each side to see that it was a 5 by 5 square. I then asked DJ if he could make any other shape with it. At first he made a trapezoid by having 2 sections straight along the bottom so I pulled the pentagon from our Geometric Cabinet and he immediately saw he could make a pentagon with the chain. Then we counted the sides and points on both pentagons. 

I know this blog could probably be renamed “all about math” but I am trying to keep language works on DJ’s radar. Today I set out the movable alphabet and asked him to write the word Dalek. (For those of you not in the know a Dalek is a cyborg on the Dr Who television series). As you can see, DJ thought the a sounded more like an o and he chose a c because he doesn’t know yet when to choose a k. 

DJ wrote this word entirely on his own while I was making lunch. I could hear him working it out as I made sandwiches. He quickly identified the d & c first. Then he noticed the l in the middle. It took him a long time to find the o and in the end he wasn’t certain if there was an a or e after the l. In my short experience teaching reading I can say vowels are weird and I don’t like them!

DJ is writing more too. He now knows enough letters well that he only wants to write those letters and not learn anything new!  Hah. Am I going to have to drag him unwillingly into the unknown for all of his education?  Note – some of the letters in this picture are upside down because we turned the board at the end. And I wrote the “da” towards the middle to show DJ he wrote the circle of his “a” the wrong direction. 

Finally, DJ describes this as “a caterpillar with legs, carrying stuff”. Gotta love it!!