Adventures in Mama-Land

Just in case we needed more reminders that what works for one kid does NOT work for others… with Naomi Rivka, manipulatives were the thing for math.  What she sees when she sees the math frogs is “MATH frogs.” They helped her concretize, see it, feel it; they were great.  With a little creative thinking on my part, these little froggies have illustrated so many things – grouping for addition, arrays for multiplication, sorting by various criteria, patterns, weights, measures, division, and waaaaay more. But with Gavriel Zev, it turns out, not so much. What he sees when he sees the math frogs are the “math FROGS!!!!”  With many insane exclamation marks on the end, because who wouldn’t go nuts when confronted with the sheer madness of about a million shiny colourful plastic frogs?  Oh, yeah, and who cares about the math? Sure, he’ll put up with them for a minute or two, so I can regroup the same seven frogs into five-and-two or six-and-one.  But only if spide...

I thought I’d seen everything in the world of educational Jewish kitsch, and was far too jaded to fall for any of it, but then I noticed this intriguing box at Israel’s on Sunday. Huh???  A product that combines my love of wooden rod-like educational manipulatives with my fascination with learning alef-bais and limudei kodesh?? The only downside is that letter “X".  Why, oh, why, do people feel that the letters “x” and “z” are so much more fascinating than, say, “cks” and “s” (as in “sticks” and “kids”)? In any event, once I got past that initial revulsion, I picked up the box, which had a nice, weighty feel to it.  I will tell you, though – I was worried.  I have seen too many cheesy Jewish educational products that are plastic and flimsy; poorly-made equivalences of secular-world games and toys.  (the hideously unoriginal Kosherland game, for instance, but also any number of low-quality beading and craft-project type products, not to mention stuffed toys...

A reader asked a question following this post about our JUMP Math program last week, and my reply got so long I decided I should probably give it its own separate post.  Her question was: I had been using math mammoth, but wanted to try Jump Math after your initial positive review and the NYT article. My son is 6, if he was in school it would be Kindergarten or Pre-1A and we are currently in the middle of 1.1. I find the amount of teacher input that they suggest in the teacher's manual to be unmanageable for me. I am not sure if it is because the work, for the most part, has come easily to him thus far, but I haven't felt the need to cover more than what is in the student workbook. In fact, i haven't even opened up the teacher's manual (that took me forever to print out) Do you play all the games, implement the BLM, the online resources? I feel like all i would get done is math if that was how we covered the contents. Wondering how you use this text, because I know...

A quick update, for a short Friday!  Here’s a bit of what we did this week: We used the “shevatim” (twelve tribes) dodecahedron die , though we didn’t play the game I made up to go along with it. Despite my being out most of yesterday and a couple of other truncated days here and there, this was a week of finishing up and getting ready to start fresh ! We finished up a brief math break between JUMP Math levels 1 and 2 – we’ve finished most of the sheets in Miquon Orange during this time, and Naomi actually asked to move on.  She’s very excited about starting fresh with JUMP 2.1 next week.  Still not sure how much of the first pages we’ll do – there’s about 20 pages of review at the beginning of the book, and since we just finished the last one a few weeks ago, we don’t really need the review… Here she is, telling time with Miquon.  Her time skills are WAY out of line with where she is with the rest of her math.  She gets confused by the numbers every which...

While Naomi Rivka was out at ballet class yesterday, Gavriel Zev enjoyed some happy one-on-one time with mama.  He’s been working well in his phonics book, Get Ready for the Code , lately, but yesterday I decided to skip it so we could work in our Math Rods ABC Book, the Cuisenaire Rods Alphabet Book .  The book hasn’t been as wonderful as I’d hoped; really, you could create your own rod drawings for a kid to fill in pretty easily.  But he still enjoys using it from time to time, and it has some basic instruction-following steps for filling in the letters (“now fill in the letter with only RED rods; count how many you used”) that he’ll do if I push him gently into it. I made a crocodile for him, while he worked on the one in the book:   Honestly, he really doesn’t like most of the pictures in the book.  But the alligator captures his imagination every time.  I think we’ve done the A page more times than any of the others put together.  He also did...

What is going on ?!?  These days, it seems like “school time” has to be stolen furtively from “everything-else time.”  We are barely getting anything done because of catching up with all the million other urgent things that must get done NOW.  Okay, you might not think yesterday morning’s “me-only” Pilates class wasn’t urgent… but that’s only because you haven’t seen the shape of me lately.  Shudder. Let me just tell you, it is NOT the same to make up “class” time in the afternoon that we missed in the morning.  First thing in the morning, Naomi Rivka is complacent, attentive happy to sit in a chair.  I suspect many people are.  First thing in the afternoon – nope!  For one thing, by the afternoon, she is probably already in the middle of a million projects.  Even if it’s something as simple as a Barbie getting married, or a series of drawings she’s working hard on.  Just take me in front of a firing squad of unschoolers for steering h...