Lessons with Makenna

Makenna is such a joy to homeschool.  She loves to learn and is easy to teach.  Unfortunately not all children are as easy going, that's why Elysia is in school this year.  Although Kenna enjoys doing her lessons she can at times get tired of book work.  At that point I try to think of some creative ways to reinforce what she is learning.

Now that Kenna can recognize her numbers and understand the value of each one, she is learning how to add.  I also thought this would be a good time to introduce number word recognition. I had her work out the problem with counting bears.  After figuring out the answer she had to find the word number card and place it  in the correct spot.

On a different day I gave her a number card that she placed on the floor.  Next I gave her another card and she had to decide if the new number came before or after the one on the floor.  We continued this until she placed all the numbers in the correct order.  I like these cards because it has the written form of the number as well.  We also do this activity with alphabet cards.

Other days when she finishes early I let her play with educational games.

Cookie Math

This is a quick video reenactment of what we did during cookie math today.  I should let you know that I had to bribe her with two cookies if she did it again in front of the camera.  Of course she didn't count as high as she did the first time.  Oh well, I'm sure you get the gist of our counting lesson.

Makenna is doing really well with her math lessons and can count without my help up to twenty nine.  She was having trouble understanding what number comes after, she wanted to say twenty ten. As I was thinking of a fun way to teach this new concept to her, I remembered back when I was doing preschool with Elysia, and decided it was time for cookie math!

She whipped up a batch of sugar cookie dough, rolled it out, used number cookie cutters, and then waited patiently until they were done!

I had her place the cookie numbers zero through nine in a line as she counted.  Then I place a number one above the line to represent the teens group.  She brought each number up to the one making a new number from the teens group.  As she came to the nine cookie she realized that there was no ten, ( here's when the light bulb went one) "Oh, I start back with the zero."  At this point I asked her what comes after one?  I replaced it with a two and explained that this is the twenties group.  We continue this for some time until she was tired.

Next, she frosted some circles with the peppermint frosting that Elysia made.  I chose a number and she had to place the same amount of chocolate chips on the circle cookie.