Math and applied imagination

Shannon had an odd assignment yesterday. She's reading The BFG, by Roald Dahl, and in it, a 24-foot giant is the main character. (he's a puny wimp compared to the 50-foot giants he lives with, but that's beside the point) Her worksheet yesterday involved having her step into one of the scenes from the book and pretend that she's hosting the giant for a visit. The giant is four times as large as a normal 6-foot man, so most of the things he'll need will also need to be multiplied by four.... how long should his bed be? What would you give him for a pillow, and how big will it be? She was supposed to take most things that she'd need, multiply them by four, and give the answer. She had no problems doing that for straight measuring stuff. But then it went on to talk about how much the giant would eat, and assumed the child would do the same thing. How many slices of pizza? How big a glass of milk? I had told her to use her imagination and pretend she was really hosting the giant for a few days. Luckily, she talked through her answers as she filled out the worksheet.

You see, just because a giant is four times as tall, does not mean he's going to eat four times as much. He'll probably eat a lot more than that. We had JUST covered doubling area and perimeters in math in the previous few days. She quickly caught on as a given that in order to double a rectangle's area, you only double one dimension, NOT both. So she instinctively took that knowledge to this literature assignment. It was quite obvious to her that 4 slices of toast would not be enough, even if 1 slice of toast would be OK for her. She felt the giant would drink 5 gallons of milk even if she can't drink a gallon. The square-cube law is totally instinctive for her, and you know what? She's right. She also used the logic that the giant had been eating snozzcumbers most of his life, and would probably love real food so much that he'd pig out and eat even MORE than he would "normally." And you know what? She's probably right there, too. She even went so far as to answer the last question the following way: "How much popcorn would the giant need?" "This is getting way too spendy, he doesn't need any."  I loved it.

So, because she answered (almost) all her questions in complete sentences and walked me through the logic she used, I decided not to "correct" her work and scold her for not simply deciding a "normal" amount and multiplying by four. Sometimes, the joy of homeschooling is combining topics and showing children that math doesn't just live in a mathbook. But sometimes, it's also OK to live in the moment and not require everything to be just so.

Aargh.

I feel like all I've been writing about lately are the hard days. But honestly, when things go smoothly, there's not a lot to write about. I like the big A-ha! moments, but a normal day is just that... normal, and not particularly blogworthy.

I use this blog more as a tool for me. It is something to keep me busy here in the schoolroom while she's working, it keeps me quiet, but mostly, it allows me to vent when we *are* having a bad day. Like today, and we've only been at it for (technically) 15 minutes.

Shannon had a sleepover last night for a friend's birthday. They scheduled it for a Sunday since everyone has today off of school. Well, everyone but Shannon. My plan was to take a few minutes to talk about Dr. King, but because we will have a short week next week (I have surgery scheduled) it simply made more sense to treat this like a normal week. That, of course, was before the snow hit.  So, already, my plans have gone out the window. Instead of picking her up by 10AM, instead Sean had to go get her after a tough morning at work... so she didn't even get home until 12:30 or so. I wanted to allow her to wind down from her party, so I told her she could go sledding for a while until we had lunch. Then, we'd start in with school. The whining began, why do we have to do school today, it's late, I don't wanna....  I reminded her that she knew before she went to the party that I'd be picking her up early so we could get some schoolwork done. I told her I had plenty of reason for it, mostly the surgery coming up next week, she may have a few days off because of it, and I really don't want to get any further behind. I persisted mostly out of stubbornness... I didn't tell her that if she hadn't made a big deal out of whining about it, I might have considered skipping today, but I didn't want her to think that her whining can influence me. (it CAN influence me, just not in the way she wants)

We then attacked schoolwork at about 2:20. Today we started with a math review worksheet. It's a nice summary of the math we've been doing all year, with an emphasis over the past 20 lessons. So the first question she rolls her eyes at me at how easy it is.  The second question she has to think for a moment, but answers confidently once again. The third question? Totally shut her down into tears. I had the nerve to ask her what half of 13 was. This was something we only covered for about one day directly, though we'd dealt with fractions for about a week. The problem was that due to vacation and Christmas, it's been about 6 weeks since we covered it. Oops. I calmly explained that there was no stress or pressure, it's simply a review to show *me* what I need to cover in more depth the next time around. This is not a test, it's a review.

The tears and frustration continue. I've been writing this on and off for the past half hour, she's currently in her room trying to gather herself up. I'm trying to balance my approach between "I don't care, we have to get it done, crying isn't going to help matters," and "It's clear we're not accomplishing anything here today other than building great big frustration blockades, so let's come back to this later."  Someday I'll find the magic solution. If I do, I promise to share. :)

Short week

As we get ready for vacation, I don't want to start a new unit just to suspend it for two weeks. Well, three once you include the Christmas craziness. So, I was stuck for ideas in how to keep Shannon engaged this week and still "do" schoolwork.

Math and spelling? Easy enough to continue. But how about reading? I decided to keep things pretty light this week, and let her pick one of her regular books that she reads for pleasure. But we mixed things up a lot... SHE is the teacher for literature this week. I told her she'd pick a book, decide how much of it I am to read in a day (and advised her I was a fast reader and could probably read more than her in a half hour), and design questions for me to answer based on that day's reading. Then, we'll do crafts or research projects based on the book. I was hoping she'd pick a Magic Treehouse book, keeping options for the extra goodies still learning opportunities, but did not require it.

She did not. A couple of weeks ago she picked a few "Dear Dumb Diary" books to take home, so that's one that I'm reading for now. She told me to read the first 6 chapters/days, and wrote about 5 questions for me. She is having a BLAST.

Whoops, time out. Brag time... she was doing her math worksheet while I was typing, and just checked her answers. 100% on doing problems in her head instead of with an abacus or on paper. She is overjoyed.

Anyway, she loves being the teacher. We're off to make a guitar I think. :)

Picking battles

Ah, the joys continue. Today's topic, lying to your children to protect your sanity (and quite possibly theirs, too.)

Math is not generally considered one of the 'fuzzy' subjects. Things are either right or they're wrong. Shannon is currently having difficulty with basic math. We're starting to get into more and more advanced concepts, and she's sailing right through those. Fractions? Simple, she loved them. Geometry? Well, not her favorite, but she plodded through and was bored silly. Last week though, we started adding large columns of numbers. Suddenly, her mind seemed to reel... no longer able to add 5 and 7 together. She's building a block that 'math is hard' ... and I'm doing my best to bust that block down as fast as she can build it. That's why I loved that she took to fractions like a duck to water. But this column thing... yeah, it looks scary, so therefore it must be hard.

The introduction technique we've done is to look for easy numbers, like groups of tens in each column before you just start adding the ones, tens, hundreds like we were all taught. I'm struggling with terminology, trying to teach the way this curriculum wants. It actually makes more sense to teach the way they want it, but when you grew up "carrying" a one, suddenly "trading for a ten" is hard to get to come out of your mouth. So we worked on this lesson for two days. Today was definitely a case of two steps forward, one step back. She finally got it... the concept of *why* she was doing things a certain way made sense and she was no longer totally bogged down by the actual adding part of it. Boom, her mood soared. Then, on the next practice problem, (adding a column of eight 2-digit numbers) she made a simple notation error, failing to make a 'dot' for one of the tens she found. This led her to have one fewer hundred to "bring down" ... making her final answer wrong by a value of a hundred. Or one, if you're simply counting how many hundreds you're adding, as we were.

Discovering the error led to tears. She's at the stage where ANY mistake is the end of the world. OK, she's been at that stage her whole life, it seems. She insisted she did it right. She wailed that she hates being corrected. I calmly fell back on my "relaxed" mom persona. Explained for the hundredth time that mistakes are a part of learning, we analyze what the mistake was and determine how serious it is, why did we do it, how do we avoid it. I told her (again) that in NO way should she ever feel bad about making mistakes while learning. I explained (again) that if you never make mistakes, you're most likely only doing the things you already know, and are not stretching your brain, not learning, not accomplishing. She finally settles down, and we make another attempt. It goes slowly, but well. I load up the last problem for her to work... and this time a straight math error while adding the ones position has her final answer incorrect. But, this time I was watching her, and she genuinely made progress on understanding the technique, the why, the how. So, luckily I was able to read her answers upside down, and when she asked me the answer, I lied. I made the answer match what she had written. I felt that in this case, the technique I was teaching was more important than the actual math follow-through.

Then, I put in my notes to add more time for card games. With repetition will come mastery without thought. Eventually. :)