Baby and School

I've decided I need to move my glider into our school room. Feeding or rocking the baby while reading a science/history chapter or calling out math problems would be so much easier while in our school room and with a comfy place for me and baby.

I decided for us it would be best to have a school room to remove distractions and focus on school while we are in there. Which I can tell we really need because today I was showing the boys a YouTube video about revolution and rotation while holding Linc in my room and Sterling got up and walked out. I called him back, but it is so much easier to focus on school work in out school space.

What do you think? Are there spaces for things in your house, too? Do things just not go right when you aren't in that designated space for the designated activity?

Memorizing Addition Facts

We are following The Well-Trained Mind version of the classical home school education as much as we can--it's intensive :) Memorization is an important piece of the classical education and memorizing addition and subtraction tables are suggested. I totally agree. Committing these tables to memory only helps with training your mind mentally and the speed in which you can do any math (lower or higher math). I've been doing my homework on tricks to teaching addition facts. It seems that there are a couple of ways to go about teaching these:

• Fact Families:  For instance, the fact family for "8" would be 8+0=8, 7+1=8, 6+2=8, you get the idea . . . 
• I like the Flocabulary CD/book that uses this method. I just have to wait to afford it because although it is not that expensive, I've pretty much maxed out my home school budget getting ready for this school year. So let me know if you get it before I do :) 
• The School Bell has a system of tubs and printables for fact families that looks interesting.
• or there is the way that I learned with mental tricks like these which you can find a couple of below and more on this link 

• Adding Zero: Model adding zero (with younger students) or review it with older students. If a child understands that when you add zero you add nothing, he/she should never get a basic fact with zero wrong. Make sure this understanding is in place.  
• Adding One (Count up): just say it and count up one.  
• Example: 6 + 1 = say 6 then 7. 
• 44 + 1 = say 44 then 45  
• Adding Two – Count up Two: Adding two means saying the larger number, then jumping up or counting up twice. Again this is always correct and never changes. 
  • Example: 9 + 2 = say 9 then 10 then 11
  • 45 + 2 say 45 then 46 then 47

What do you like? Do you agree these facts should be memorized? Did you have tricks to figuring out addition and subtraction problems easily?

Ap: Math Bingo

Sterling has been playing the ap Math Bingo and loving it this morning. You can choose between addition, subtraction, division, multiplication and I think there is an everything game. Anyway, you earn little bugs and then you can use your bugs in the bug bungee game. He said it's his new favorite game on the iPad :) Yea! Anything to make math work a little more fun. Even Carter was playing, with Mom's help. He read the addition sentence, we counted the problem together and then he found the answer and marked it. The ap was 99cents--it's worth it!

The Earth

We started off by rolling some playdough into a ball and poking a pencil through for to show the North and the South Poles.

Then we used playdough to discuss the core, the mantle and the crust of the Earth.

Yea for Science Class today :)

History--SOTW volume II

2011-2012 we are studying Story of the World volume 2: The Middle Ages: From the Fall of Rome to the Rise of the Renaissance. That's a mouthful :) I think I've blogged about SOTW before so I won't talk too much about it. A mom from the co-op shared the blog Run of the Mill Family with us that has resources and lapbook activities that correlate with SOTW. Yea!! These seem like fun review activities as you move through the book, chapter by chapter. We've done one so far and the boys seemed to like it. I liked that it reviewed some of the facts that we read yesterday during history :)

Space and Planets

We are studying Earth Science this year in school and are starting with the solar system. The curriculum we are using is the Mr. Q Earth Science. So far, I love it. We are two chapters in, but the chapters are short enough to read to Sterling (1st grade) and hopefully, he'll be able to read them on his own soon! They are written clearly and seem interesting enough to keep his attention.
.
These are some of the enrichment activities we are doing with space and planets at home.

Solar System Scavenger Hunt
Socks in Space -- PBSkids.org game
To The Moon -- printable game board with space trivia

Fractions: Use a Hershey's Bar

What a concept! I read this idea on a home school blog and immediately thought of Carter who absolutely loves a Hershey's chocolate bar :) He may take after his mother with a little bit of a sweet tooth!

As I will be starting fractions at some point this year with Sterling, I just wanted to make note of the idea for future reference.

I guess there is a book called The Hershey's Milk Chocolate Bar Fraction Book that may be worth checking out (oh, bummer, our library doesn't have it). I'm sure that I can come up with my own explanation for fractions with a chocolate bar divided evenly into 12 small rectangles . . .