Wednesday, February 14, 2007

much math-merrily

So flash cards hey? Well they have traditionally been utilized in a very gross way (competitive maths in the classroom, the teacher flashing the card in the poor students face while the rest of the class sniggers away appreciatively). Which is why I surprised myself doubly yesterday. First by entering the dollar store (I recently vowed to boycott cheap ‘made in China’ products as far as is humanly possible) and secondly by buying multiplication flash cards for M ( plus a rubric cube for E and sizzling magnets, a weird clicky toy and an activity book for Br).

I thought this is not a bad way to expose M to times tables- she likes to have her own stuff and I think she is likely to use them.

It might seem that it's not unschooling to use these. But the thing is I'm not imposing them onto her. I think traditional tools can have their role too- It's what and how you use them- how the learner uses them that is! She"s interested so that suits me.

It’s been a sort of ‘mathy’ time around here these days anyway. We’ve been playing yahtzee, chess. Br asked for more subtraction and addition problems. Today, some one sent a really cool link to a math site http://www.teachers.ash.org.au/suel/maths/reallife.html. It was a photo gallery of math in nature- fascinating stuff. I got the kids to gather around the screen and see.

Later E got interested (at my suggestion) in construction a spiral using the Fibonacci sequence (Fibonacci rectangles and shell spirals)- a lot of fun.

http://www.mcs.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/R.Knott/Fibonacci/fibnat.html

She plans to cover an entire bedroom wall with this drawing- and she plans to embellish it with more infinite series, geometric designs etc. “Interesting wall paper,” she laughs.

Br worked on geometric designs from this book I rescued a few years ago, in the garbage. It’s called The Story of Mathematics by Hy Ruchlis and Jack Engelhardt. She made a gorgeous design using a protractor and compass-and we are going to do more of these. M even got interested! Which is saying much because right now all she wants to do is play solitaire on the computer! Eek!

By BE

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It is so fun to read another parent being excited about what their kids are doing/learning. It's refreshing, as if I shared something like this with certain others, they'd misunderstand and call it "bragging". We unschoolers *get it* !!!! The flash cards sound fun. We like games around here, too, like dominoes and matching.

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