It has occurred to me with all of our travels that I haven’t written much about DJ’s math work. When we first started the sequence, it felt very linear – one activity had to be mastered before the next would make sense. But this year I feel like his math has splintered into a number of parallel activities. 

The Tens Board was work we did last year that DJ fought against but sort of completed. I’m finding though after our summer break, he has cleared his memory of the words twenty, thirty, forty, etc. Which means his linear counting is at a stand still and I really need for him to go back and revisit this. Except he hates to go backwards and he didn’t love this work the first time around. 

Linear counting with the Complete Bead Material is another area DJ should be working on, but aside from making the chains into squares or cubes, he really doesn’t love labeling or counting them. 

DJ still loves the Golden Bead material for doing addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. I had read several resources that children were happy to move on to the Stamp Game because it was less cumbersome that the Golden Beads, but not DJ – he loves all those blocks & beads. He doesn’t need this work any longer but I let him choose it to keep him engaged. 

The Stamp Game is supposed to follow Golden Bead work. When I can get DJ to do a problem, he does it easily. So far he has done addition and subtraction. The biggest challenge for him in this work is reading the problem on the paper and writing the answer. I’ve begun to wonder if we spent so much time with the Golden Beads that DJ doesn’t really need to Stamp Game. But I will continue to encourage him to do it to promote the more abstract nature of thi material compared to Golden Beads. 

At the same time, I have introduced a new material to DJ, inspired by his frequent question of “what does 4 & 3 make” or “2 & 5”, etc. this is the Snake Game. It is the beginning of the addition facts memorization. You start with a “snake” of colored bead bars (twos through nines). From the beginning of the snake, you count until you get to 10. Then you replace the colored beads with a golden 10-bar and black&white filler bar for however many beads were left in the last bar. So if your first two bars were 5 & 7, you would replace them with a gold 10 and black 2. Then starting with the 2, you’d count to 10 again until you’ve replaced all of the bars with 10’s plus and final number less than 10’s. This is a sneaky way to get DJ to innately see that 5&7 equals 10&2. 

The next phase after all of that would be the addition strip board, which is pictured above. I had acquired the red & blue strips (seen below) but I didn’t have the board, so I printed one using Word. I hesitated to present this to DJ because I felt like he needed to progress in all of the previous work first. But he continued to ask “what do 5 & 2 make?” and then he began to answer those questions himself! So I figured I would try it and see. 

When I showed him the board with the strips, he immediately ordered each set from 1 to 9. Perhaps they seemed like Red Rods to him?  I then asked DJ of he would like to know what 9 & 7 make. He placed a blue 9 on the first row and then a red 7 next to it. I pointed to the number on the top row just above the end of the red 7 and he said “16”!  Now he doesn’t have to ask me anymore. He can figure it out with the board. 

The Addition Strip Board is then used to complete an Addition Tables Booklet. I printed this book that I typed into Word and then spiral bound it with the binding machine I got for Christmas last year. I showed him the first page. We did the first two problems together and I suggested he do the rest himself. 

He did the 3rd & 4th problems using the strip board and then he paused a said, “Hey! I know these answers!” and he proceeded to fill in the rest of the page on his own. Aside from needing to practice writing some numbers, he totally got this!  The next day he did the Table of Two and the next he completed the Table of Three. All with similar speed and accuracy. It looks like I will be printing the next booklet, in random order, very soon. 

And I’m SO glad I didn’t wait any longer to give him this work!!!