Reading and Whole Lot of Math

These were the books on our table last week!

The People Could Fly is a recommended read-aloud for first grade, but also fit in with E's geography lessons. Good stories, but hard to read! They are written with an accent. e asked me why I was talking like our librarians, lol...

 

Frog and Toad was e's reading for the week. One week of Explode the Code and she's all over books now! Confidence. She now makes a beeline for the Easy Readers and has her nose in a book the whole way home. Love, love, love. She helps me scan book spines in the chapter book section for read-alouds, and actually found a new book of Pooh stories written in the old style of A.A. Milne AND a Paddington book by reading titles. Very proud of herself.

 

House building for Children is for E. We are finally going to start his THIRD GRADE building project. It's going to sit under the fig tree, up near the fence. I'm pretty excited. Math in action.

e's math consolidation main lesson block has come to a close. I am so sad. I love these stories! Best ever. e enjoyed them as much as E did, and produced entirely different and yet similar main lesson book pages. These two children of mine are so different and yet so much alike. :)

 

Subtraction:

Multiplication:

Division:

At this point, e can count forward AND back up to times 12 by 2s, 3s, 5s, 10s, and 100s. She's pretty math savvy. Both of my children have gained wonderful number sense from every day living and observation, so the four processes come almost naturally. Such a different approach from the way I learned math in school.

 

One of those everyday life experiences has been our square-foot garden. e is right beside me every step of the way. E likes to seem indifferent to it...but I know otherwise.

There is so much math to be done in the garden without me trying to create it. The kids naturally start calculating things and announcing their answers!

 

And science. For instance, is this one plant producing two shades of flowers, or two growing close together? We can't tell. E is trying to think up ways to find out.

e's most exciting addition to our garden: strawberries! She got to taste the first fruits of her labors today.

No garden of ours would be complete without a chocolate mint plant, right? The plant on the left is chocolate mint. On the right sits a peppermint. Mmmm.

I hope everything survives the scorching summer. I'm learning as I go!