School: Candy Math and Verse of the Week

Preschool and Tot School this week was just me adding some additional instruction on top of their current activities and interests.  One night while I was making dinner the kids pulled out their markers and paper for some art (Summer loves to wear her beret when she does art to be like Bridget from the book Bridget's Beret).

Summer has been very interested in addition lately.

On this paper she did 3+3=6 and 4+4=8 on her fingers.  When she did 10+10=20 she used her fingers and toes.  When she did 11+11=22 she used dots on her paper in two groups of 11 and then counted them all by herself.  I was pretty impressed so I snapped a pictures.  (fyi her "2"'s look like "5"'s).

After she did 11+11 = 22 on her last paper, she started getting really curious about adding big numbers.  She came up with all the problems, but we used teamwork to find the answers - she added the first numbers (i.e. 4+4 for 400 + 400) and then I showed her how to put the extra two zeros.).  Again, her "2"'s look like "5"'s :)

Colton drew a pretty awesome spider :)

One chilly morning Summer was again working on math, all on her own while I was feeding Larkyn...

I love the circles on the sides of the paper because it shows how she thinks about a problem...for example to solve "44+44" she drew 4 circles on one side and 4 circles on the other and then counted them all to find "8" twice for the sum of "88".

Colton entertained himself by coloring and cutting with scissors, however after about 15 minutes he just needed to MOVE!  So after I finished feeding Larkyn I made up a game involving movement, candy, and numbers to help get some of his excess energy out...and it worked :)

I set up plates with numbers on one side of the room and had the large bag of candy (that we have collected from all the parades we have gone to all summer!) on the other side of the room.  His job was to run back and forth and get the right number of pieces of candy on each plate.  Click here for a video of him in action.

Video of Colton:

 
 Summer wanted to join in the fun of "candy running" so we made up an addition game for her where all of the answers were the numbers 1 through 5.  She completed the problem and then ran to put her candy on the correct plate.  Here is a video:




I had told Colton we could do a candy graph, and he was pretty excited about it (anything that involves candy is exciting at our house).  I had some leftover jelly beans from Easter and they proved to be the perfect thing for a graph.  First he color coded the key as shown in this video...



 Then he sorted the jelly beans by color and put them in their right spots on the graph as shown in this video:



He really focused throughout the whole activity and didn't need any help from me once he got going!  After he finished we attempted to "read" the graph in two year old language.

Here is a video...

Colton's Jelly Bean Graph

While Colton worked on his jelly bean graph, Summer worked on a sight word graph.

She searched in an article for certain sight words and highlighted them in coordinating colors.

The corner of the paper is cut off because she found her name as she was searching for sight words and cut it out to tape into her notebook :)

She then graphed how many times she found each sight word.  This activity has proved to be AMAZING and she can now recognize and spell (all on her own) the words "to" and "and" anytime she is writing or reading.

I'll end with posting our verse of the week from last week:  Acts 5:29 "We must obey God rather than men." Summer and I had great conversations this week about how friends may ask her to do something she knows is wrong, but she must obey God and her parents rather than her friends. I love these conversations with her and want to get as much training in righteousness in before she goes off to school without me someday!!!