We have been more active with our homeschool group this year. Although most of the events are just social in nature, the group also likes to do community service activities. Last week DJ went to his first such event. A local non-profit farm grows food for local food banks like Northwest Harvest. They use volunteers from groups like Girl Scouts and our homeschool group to plant the seeds and to assist with harvest. I found it amusing that our lead,…
I often start our weekly school time by asking DJ to “choose something to do.” This week his answer to my question was the 45 Layout – again. DJ first did this work back in June 2015. This is a BIG work for a little person. It involves laying out all of the 1 to 9000 number cards along with corresponding Golden Beads. Sometimes called the “Bird’s Eye View,” the purpose is to give a very tangible experience of the…
After a year of working with the Golden Bead materials, I introduced DJ to the Stamp Game this week. This material will be used in a very similar way to the Golden Beads to do addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. However, instead of have a tiny unit bead and a large thousand cube, each category will be represented with a small square with the category written on it. This is the beginning of the “passage to abstraction” – although DJ…
I finally got around to presenting Box 5 of the Constructive Triangles to DJ this week. I have to say these boxes are probably my favorite of all the sensorial materials. They have been so much fun. Because it had been awhile since we had worked with them, we started back at the beginning with a review. Rectangle Box A – this box shows how triangles can make a square, rectangle, rhombus, 3 different parallelograms and a trapezoid. Since we…