I presented Golden Bead Division to DJ this week. I had been most nervous about this operation and I don’t know why because it seemed DJ understood it better than any of the others. I started by having him roll the place value ice to choose the starting quantity. He first rolled 9,290 so I began to use my calculator to figure out how to adjust it to a number evenly divisible by 3. But before I finished, DJ picked…
DJ received this neat US map placemat for his birthday last week. It has images on the various states representing things you would find in that state. Then the border has some of the same images so you can play a game of finding which state each one belongs in. It also sparked questions like why the pig was in Iowa and the alligator in Florida. That inspired him to pull out his US puzzle map. He placed all 49…
We did almost no school this week. I spent most of the week sick and uninterested in being a responsible homeschool teacher. So this is going to be a shorter post than usual. We did enjoy our annual trip to the fire station with our homeschool group. This is the third year that DJ has attended and he loved it as usual. He did not want to leave when it was over. This particular fire station is an educational center…
So as the school year progresses on, I presented Golden Bead Multiplication to my almost 4-year old this week! I would NEVER have thought to introduce the concept of multiplication in preschool but seeing the way Montessori does it, it makes SO much sense. I started off by giving DJ a number, 1,324, and asking him to build the number with beads. Then, I laid out the same number two more times and asked him what he noticed about them….