Peg board fun.

Hope recently had her 2 1/2 year check up with the local health visitor and one of the things she was tested on was her fine motor skills using peg boards and pegs like these. She loved playing with them. I'd been meaning to get some for home, but hadn't seen them available anywhere. I eventually got this set on ebay for around £10.
With five boards, there were enough for the three children to spend quite a bit of time on their designs.
But it was Henry that was still engaged in this activity long after the girls had moved off to sing 'Barney' songs...
... and he filled up all these boards - using his left hand which was the injured one.

The peg boards are useful for a range of concepts such as repeating patterns and symmetry.

The set also came with some games ideas and I played Honor at four in a row just using some blue and green pegs.

Doubling dominoes

Oh, and here are some more maths bits that we did; finding different ways of making 12 and practising doubling numbers.

We use these dominoes that I purchased from a website called taskmaster. I own quite a few sets now including percentage calculations and fractions of numbers. I find them very useful.

Crazy about cuisenaire!

I'm getting more and more into using the cuisenaire rods with the kids to help them in their understanding of maths concepts. They are so useful and the children enjoy 'doing maths' like this.
This morning, Henry used them to learn about odd and even numbers...

... and number bonds to 10 using the rods to make '10' trains to match the orange rod.

He then recorded his work on the sheet.

Following this, we looked at adding some series of 3 numbers, 2 of which made 10 and then adding on the third number. He got the hang of all this very quickly.

Then we got out the base ten set and practised adding 10's and 100's to a variety of 2 and 3 digit numbers so that he could see physically how the numbers change in a specific place. He was then able to complete some number sequences easily.

Practical life

Here is an update of the practical learning activities that the children have been doing around the house lately. Hope enjoys doing a variety of Montessori tasks such as using tongs (though she often cheats and uses her fingers) to pass objects such as little plastic frogs from a container into the portions of an ice-cube tray.
In these pics she is transferring water from the left bowl to the right using a sponge. These activities are thought to get young children ready for the left to right process in learning to read. Then we played with the little frogs, counting them and making them jump from pool to pool.
Henry uses these base ten blocks which are fabulous for helping him understand loads of number concepts.
Here, we are about to follow a recipe for cheese stars from this jolly phonics book.


And I set up this pet shop to help the kids learn about adding up money and calculating change. This play till cost £10 and as well as calculating mentally, the children checked their answers using the till as preparation for future SATs tests that they sit in school - one of the papers is a calculator paper.
More uses for ice-cube trays! I've almost managed to sort out my homemade moveable alphabet. I just need one more for my vowel sounds.
We use this alphabet for word building. I am currently making a new set of tactile letters for Hope. I used to have a set of sandpaper one that I made years ago but they got ruined when the hot water tank leaked into our cupboard. As I don't much like the feel of sandpaper and find it quite tough to cut the letters out, I decided this time to use foam board and lighter foam to make these.

The website MontessoriMom.com has some great ideas and free resources.

Another Wildwood maths trail

It's the summer holidays again! Woo, hoo!

We started ours with a maths trail at the wildlife park, Wildwood again. I can't believe it is a whole year since I posted about the last one. The questions were quite similar to the last one, with HM working out how long the journey there took, how fast I was going (60 mph) and how far would we get in half an hour. At the entrance she had to work out the cost for a family of four and then what the saving would be if the special family ticket was purchased.

Henry's questions involved recording times, speed, money etc. They both had to record the numbers of adders, wolves and rats seen and construct a bar graph to show the info. HM had to construct a pie chart also.

This is the beaver dam. They are huge (asleep in their burrows ) but Hope had been waiting all this time to see her favourite animals... the baby ducklings!

I intend to do a lot more of this sort of thing over the next six weeks.

A maths update

Here, Honor is working on pie chart fractions with plasticine.
And we've been using these rainbow fraction circles quite a bit lately.
Here, she is adding fractions with different denominators.

We used the fraction circles to visually demonstrate how to convert the fractions so that they have the same denominators.

And the rest of the week.

A bit of outdoor practical maths practice for Honor. Here she is describing the directions for getting from point X to point Y. It is an end of Key Stage 2 maths skill as is calculating the area of a composite shape. We tried this out on our patio which was perfect. Our patio is composed of a large rectangle measuring 12 x 7 slabs and a smaller square measuring 4 x 4 slabs. Then we added the two areas together to find the total area.

We had some messy fun washing the cars...
... and then we went to Church where I sat worrying about and praying for the future for our children. The Gospel message was, coincidentally (that always happens!), 'don't worry'!
So then we went to see my friend Lisa's new house. It's great. And then she took us out for a meal.

We had a lovely time.
Until someone (me) mentioned the Government and Dave's promises to support marriage, the family and people who work for a living. Ha! Oh well.

Overall, a great week and it is back to school tomorrow.

Playing card maths

At 'snow school' today, the kids did a bit of maths using a deck of playing cards.

Here, Honor is calculating 5 0r 6 numbers from cards dealt out at random using number bonds and knowledge of multiples as strategies for quick mental addition.
So from these cards she picks out the two cards that make 10...

... then adds on the next biggest number to make 16 and finally adds 2 x 1 to make 18.
From these cards, she found 3 x 10 and then added 2x3 to make 36.

Henry is in year 1 at school and is learning his number bonds to 10.
Here, he is matching the correct numbers to 10. He needs to practise this a bit more, but I think he nearly has it.