We are about 6 months into Finn’s kindergarten year, his first year of homeschooling, and he’s made some really great progress. I’ve been employing the constructivist math techniques that I gained from my Kamii class and which has been affirmed in by my study of classical christian education. Finn is now able to solve addition, subtraction, and simple multiplication word problems… sometimes in his head and other times by drawing pictures with a pencil and paper. He’s just beginning to “count on” when adding numbers occasionally, and he’s beginning to be able to think a little more abstractly with numbers in his head. This morning I asked him how many 6’s are in 18, and after thinking for a few seconds a big smile grew on his face and he said, “there’s three! Because there’s two nines in eighteen with one six in each of the nines and another in the middle from the two threes.” This made both he and I quite proud.
Every once in a while I write out an equation such as “7 + 9 = ?” so that he is reminded of how we write problems in math language, and he understand and can solve them. We practice counting forward and backward most days and sometimes we practice counting by 2s. Finn especially enjoys problems such as “how many 4s are in 16?” He’ll often use his counting chips to figure these problems out, though he’s beginning to remember many of them. He sometimes asks me such division problems at random times in the day, attempting to stump me with large numbers.
I’m more and more convinced that focusing primarily on word problems as long as possible is the way to go. I just need to find the curricula and books to keep me going!
- Laura
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