Isaiah's still working on recognizing his numbers 0-20 (he knows some but not others) and we've been trying to introduce the concept of adding. This lets us work on both. All the red lids have the numbers 0-10, two sets. All the blue lids have the numbers 0-20, one set. Then the purple ones have the addition sign and the equals sign. (Someday when we get nerdier we'll add subtraction, division, etc.) We start with all the red lids upside down and Isaiah picks two of them and tells me what the numbers say. Then we set it up with the purple ones and practice reading the number sentence. Next we add beans because that seems to help Zay count. (I've since replaced the black beans with some large lima beans that I dyed rainbow colors). Anyway, then we practice adding up all the beans and then Zay looks for the blue lid with the corresponding number. Of course he needs help throughout. Anyway, once we find the right blue one we finish the sentence and read it again.
Next comes the fun part--when he's finished with those two red numbers he puts them in a line. After each round he adds two more to the line, which he calls his train, and he gets really excited to see how big his train is. (Yes, my children are doomed to geekiness and instead of trying to help them overcome it I tend to encourage it.) Anyway, we keep playing either until we've used all the red lids or until he gets bored, whichever comes first. Because I may be nerdy enough to get my kids to play Milk Math, but I'm not horrible enough to force them into it.
By the way, when I showed Jerel Milk Math and bragged about how I'd made it for free he said something about how since each gallon of milk cost like $2.75 and we had about 50 lids in the game, this (at about $140) was actually the most expensive game we own. That's Jerel's version of milk math...
No comments:
Post a Comment