Math Lesson 29 Sept 2009

This is the house that math built. Looks like a pile of blocks but it was quite a feat of engineering...lots and lots of math went into it on the subconscious level but also on the very conscious level, as he figured out how to make the roof, how many he needed to make it even on both sides etc. A few questions from me also helped make this a learning experience as well as a reward for doing lots of math problems. NOTE the square root problems under it...we of course counted the sides but before this it was a simple lesson on multiplication and counting by 2s and 5s...




This shows how we don't stop at 9 nor even 12...we have multiplication to 16 here...and these squares were counted in many ways. First we counted to 32 by 2s, then by 8's...and to 48 by 3s and then by 12's. He found counting by 12 was actually pretty easy because "it's just like counting by ones and twos...12, 24, 36, 48!"

Then we counted square roots. The symbols are sloppy but readable and again the child is but SEVEN...! Writing out that the square root of 32 is 4 square roots of 2 was easy and redundant...same with the square root of 48...4 square roots of 3. "This math stuff is easy."

Before all this we built a full top tray of addends, then did some 100.00 minus xx.xx and then some two digit subtraction...we did a whole lot of problems in a short period of time and the reward was the house...Crewton Ramone's House of Math.