Why just teach one thing at a time?

Upon seeing this picture the youngest boy said, "That's us doing our shapes and counting!!" For him that's exactly what it was. For the older boy we were building rectangles and counting the parts....one big red one, five blue ones, two pink ones which are threes so six units. We do addition multiplication and counting all at once. We also pattern for 13 x 12 = 156 and we learn a little place value (count the big ones first).

I was at a party recently, handed someone my card and he said, "Math?!! My kid's only 3 years old." To which I replied, "are you teaching him English?"
Those nearby laughed and nodded...
"Math the way I teach it is a language. Just check out my website. Take what you like leave the rest."

Before this we did more place value. Then we just named the blocks one through ten and of course the hundred even though they already know it...Then did multiplication.

Started with 12 x 13 = 156 and spent time counting all the parts and counting the sides. Look at all the math:



**added 2 tens and 3 tens to get 5 tens
**counted 3 two times to get six
**saw that six can be a rectangle made with 2 threes or 3 twos...
**counted the big one then the blue ones and the units and talked about what each number in 156 meant.

Counted the sides very carefully to get 12 and 13...from 1 to 12 and from 1 to 13. then we counted fast, one ten and three more or one ten and two more is so much faster than counting 1,2,3,4,5,6....

Again they have to be taught to start at 10 even though they supposedly "know" one side of the red square is ten or the blue bar is ten...

Then we flipped them over and did algebra..and we were done...might have spent 20 minutes tops...on the entire lesson.

This compound teaching where each students takes away something different but where more than one concept is introduced at a time. Again the sub-concious mind logs all this information. It can (and will) be drawn forth later.