Well, it's been a fun and exciting and frustrating week of homeschooling. Yep, all that rolled into one. I love seeing my kids happily learning something new. I love to see the joy of accomplishment. It's not always that much fun trying to keep three young boys on task. I'm sure those of you with several young children know exactly what I'm talking about.
But the past couple of days the biggest problem I'm having is getting Mitchell to work through his math problems. I helped him often enough with math homework from public school last year to know that he knows what to and how to do it. This year it's like he's afraid to try even the simplest problems. At first it seemed like he was just being distracted by what Matthew and Michael were doing (which is their preschool level worksheets usually). Today we worked alone and I could see it was more than that. He really didn't want to do it. We took a break from it and moved onto some science stuff (marsupials!) and some online animations of thunderstorms. Then we came back to math and I "talked him down" by offering to reward him with some big red check marks in his work book if he just tried. I told him that I didn't care if he got the problems wrong or not. That got him started so we finished one page then we moved onto an earlier page where we'd really run into a roadblock. This page had four small sets of problems (10 total) and I promised one check mark for each section he finished. He breezed through them with minimal fuss with only one error I think. Good job Mitchell!
We've been using Miquon for math, by the way. We had looked at Saxon and Singapore and thought Miquon might be a happy medium between the repetitiveness (so we've heard) of Saxon and the more advanced level of Singapore. We have the counting rods but Mitchell seems to have trouble wrapping his head around how to use them usually and prefers to count on a ruler or his fingers. That's fine, as long as he finds a way to solve his problems I'm happy. I think the biggest problem is confidence and initiative. Perhaps I'll continue with rewarding effort and hope for the best as we move along.
1 comment:
Good job at getting through your first week!
Another few math suggestions that my kids liked when they were younger was the number line - you bounce back or forward from it - probably similar to his using a ruler. They also loved playing math war and other card games, and pretend shopping. It is hard sometimes to make math more fun. hang in there!
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