Friday already. This week sped by. Always the way, the more I like the activities the quicker they go by and all of a sudden it’s over, and tine for the boys to argue about what theme we have for next week. UNTIL TODAY! I’m learning, and the weeks will no longer start with screwing”I. DONT. WANT.TO.LEARN.ABOUT.THAT” into each others faces. We now have topics in a jar. Arthur will pull one out each Saturday. We already pulled our one for next week though, the excitement of the new jar was too tempting to wait.
I managed to get a huge amount of stuff done whilst the boys were working. They finished much more quickly than I anticipated, the worked in almost complete silence which is a major indicated that they are completely focused. See below for their finished rainbow!
Todays academic time came to us from a really phenomenal rainbow themed activity pack that I found online. Its absolutely packed full of ideas and printable for kids to enjoy. There are a TON of choices but I only picked 2. For William I chose a probability dice game. It’s pretty easy to set up. Print the two pages with the bar graph, and then the template for the dice. William gathered pens in rainbow colors as we chatted about probability and the basic statistics behind rolling a dice. Both the big boys are very into math, and alway sheen to do any worksheet that’s math based. I’m so thrilled they like it. There is so much negativity around Math as a subject. People are always so quick to proudly exclaim “Oh I’m so bad at math” to anyone and everyone. Can you imagine if you just told people “I can hardly read.” You just wouldn’t, because literacy seems to have an importance added to it, people keep very quiet about having poor comprehension skills. On the other hand it’s socially acceptable to be bad at numeracy. I think a ton of this is cultural, we are just taught that math is harder, and that we will struggle. Start young with making math fun. You’ll never regret it.
William rolled his dice 20 times and colored the corresponding square onto the bar graph to collect his data. Because he had chosen to use specific colors for specific sides of the dice I showed how how to do a key, and make color marks on his graph so he knew which color to use. He was pretty excited that until the very last roll there had not been a single blue square colored!
For Teddy we did some adding and subtracting. Ted can add and subtract up to ten in his head pretty easily. Because of this I knew this would be a quick one. I had laminated the task cards so that he could use a dry erase then wipe off, and one day I can use them again for Arthur. You could also use a clothespin for the child to clip onto the correct number. However I wanted Teddy to also write the answers next to the “=” as he is still working on forming numbers. The entire project was nowhere near as quick as I thought it would be. Teddy sat down. Looked at the cards, and then announced that he couldn’t continue without his number blocks. He definitely didn’t need them. I saw him looking at 5-2. He grabbed 3 number blocks. Put them down, and then said, “ok, need 2 more for 5” At least he’s grasped inverse operations! He diligently went about setting up his number blocks for every equation. Chatting to them as he went. He would have 4+1 and arrange 4 number blocks. Then he’d put on on the other end of the table and shout “help me, help me, I’m alone.” and the four number blocks would shout back, we’re coming for you. Its a very entreating game to him, working with his blocks, but goodness, its not conducive to speed.
I hope you’ve all loved Rainbows as much as we have. It’s been impossible to be glum all week with all the colors and brightness they have brought to us. See you all on Monday for fruit week. I’ve got a taste test activity I’m super excited for!
LINKS AND SOURCES TO RESOURCES
- Craft: handprint rainbows
- Read: Rainbow reading comprehension
- Educate: Rainbow learning pack
- Watch: 7 fun facts about rainbows
Raising Truffles 