Some days are good math days...

...and some days aren't. I've finally learned that it's better to let go of math on the bad math days and move on to something else.

It was a bad math day but an excellent day for flower arranging. Thing 4 spent a great deal of time carefully choosing flowers and greenery from our backyard and making flower arrangements. This was one of her favorites.

It made the bad math day a lot less frustrating.

Ahhh...Spring!

Math is so much more pleasant when it's done on the front porch glider.

It took her longer than normal (and that's a l-o-n-g time) to finish her assignment because she spotted the coolest looking bird in the front yard. She spent a good deal of time just observing him. Any day we can combine nature and math is a perfect day in my book.

Fun New Math Game

As I may or may not have mentioned, teaching AC math is a bit of a challenge. It's not that she's not good at math, quite the opposite is true. She is a math whiz if she's doing it in her head. She just has a mental block where math work is concerned. I think it's partly a confidence issue.

After beating my head against a wall and causing my ever-patient homeschooling friends to want to beat their heads against a wall due to my incessant whining about our math struggles, I finally took the advice of all three of those friends and ditched our math curriculum (for the time being). Instead, we do kitchen math, mental math, math games, games that are not math games but that require math skills (like Yahtzee), and work from the incredible "Math Pamphlet" that my good friend made for AC. (That's a whole other post. It's really wonderful.)

In my search for ways to work on math without it seeming like we are working on math, I came across the Exact Change Card Game. Not only is it a great way to teach money skills, but it is perfect to teach children how to add a series of numbers with regrouping. I have AC do all the adding for all of us. It's great practice and is a good confidence builder for her. I think it's really going to help. Hopefully, we can start our Singapore Math curriculum again soon.

2nd Grade Math Is Going To Kill Me

I tend to post about all the fun things we do here in our little school at home. Readers of this blog (all three of you) might get the idea that it's just all rosy and cheery all the time...that all we do is read, do crafts, cook, take field trips, socialize (imagine that!) and have fun. We do a lot of that.

We also do math. Or at least we try.

I used to be able to get my hair colored every six weeks. That is, I used to do it every six weeks until I started teaching Thing 4 math. Now I have to go every five weeks and I should go every four. I have a lot of gray hair. I blame it all on math.

Thing 4 does not like math. In fact, she hates math. She will do just about anything to avoid doing math.

She's not bad at math. Actually, she's quite good at it as long as it's not pencil and paper math. Ask her how many eggs are in four dozen and she can tell you without even stopping to think about it. Ask her how many weeks are in three months. She can tell you that, too. You can even ask her how much change she'll get back if the item she's purchasing is $14.50 and she gives the clerk a twenty.

But she hates doing math in school.

Math is going to be the death of one of us.

Here's a photo I took the other day when we were doing math. When I left, there were only two problems on the board...nothing else. The problem on the left, I worked with her. The problem on the right (the one where she is incorrectly subtracting from left to right) is the one I gave her to do while I ran and switched the laundry out and started another load. One problem. That's simple enough, right?

When I came back, the board looked like this:

Excuse me while I call the salon.