our school week, having fun with math

It always looks like this when the library throws up on my living room floor. Math books, phonics books, geography and science books, music, movies......and this time, I took not only Ben and Alli, but (gasp) Jocelyn and Lauren! BY MYSELF. Yes, I, Dana Maize, took four kids ages five and under to the library. I know, I know, people do it all the time, but it's the first time I've done it with all of them and to be honest, I was just a tiny bit scared, especially since Lauren is only seven months old. Of course, we did spend the first ten minutes in the bathroom so three of the four could do their business, but after that, smooth sailing.


I'm starting some very casual geography lessons with the kids, so we checked out some books that reference various European countries. The first one on our list is Madeline, so we can learn a bit about France.

Aside from that and phonics for Ben, we really focused on math this week. This is an activity I thought up all by myself. I was so proud. ;)

I save some of the baby food jars because I've learned they come in handy for a ton of stuff. We were focusing on the letter five this week, so I labeled five jars with the numbers one through five and passed them out.

Then I put a jar of small "stuff" in front of each child and asked them to put a matching number of shells/pom-poms/beans into their jar. Alli had trouble with it at first, just filling her baby food jar to the top each time, but she finally caught on. That's the thing about learning. Sometimes it's child-directed, sometimes it's teacher-directed.

Yesterday we tried a math game that introduced the "look" of five. I gave each kid five blocks (from the game "Don't Break the Ice!"). Then I turned on some fun music and told them to move their blocks around until the music stopped.

Then they were to make a design with their five blocks, a different one each time. It was fun to see them come up with something different each time, and they were able to recognize different groupings of five. I think we'll try this again, mixing up the number of blocks.

I've had these stored in my documents for about a year, and finally had them copied! They are clothespin counting cards. You match a clothespin to each dot on a number card.

We also used it this way, placing a bean on each dot. The cards really should be cardstock, or laminated, but this activity worked well because I slipped the number cards underneath our plastic tablecover.

For a measuring activity, I traced each child's foot, cut it out, and we used each of them to measure different things around the house. I kept a simple chart of how many "feet" long the item was for each child, and then we talked about how many of Ben's feet it took compared to Mommy's, and so on.

We're still learning days of the week and reading about caterpillars, so we're still reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar. And we're on the letter "C" this week, so we had to read it some more. I can't remember where I got these...maybe from Currclick.com? Anyway, there are number pages from 1-5, so I put them around the table, and when I got to the days of the week (on Thursday he ate through four red strawberries), each child looked to see who had the correct page and then colored in the circles.

I didn't post last week's "B" pages - banana b and Bumblebee B. We read books about bananas and boats. The Owl and the Pussycat illustrated by Jan Brett is one of our favorites, with the beautiful pea-green boat and all of her amazing sea illustrations.

Our "C" craft this week was, of course, caterpillars. I tell you, I'm loving this alphabet. It's going to be so fun to see all of these cute letters together in one album!

So that pretty much wraps up our homeschool week.

Now I get to spend the weekend with them.

I can't seem to find the words.