Math Games We've Been Playing Lately

These past six weeks or so, LD has been doing a lot of work in his math workbook (that's not terribly exciting to blog about, is it?!!). That was easiest for me while we were on travel and as we settled in. We generally use Right Start Math, but it is quite Mom-intensive, so we had to put that on the back burner for a while. In fact, we only started back into Right Start this week.

In addition to the math workbook, we've been playing some math games. DD is LOVING math time and begs to play math games most of the day.  She is doing simple addition with these games while LD has been focusing on subtraction.

Fast Track: We got the idea for this from the wonderful book, Games for Math by Peggy Kaye. It is a simple path with several start boxes, several win boxes and others such as draw two, go ahead two, go back three, stay put, double move, triple move.

Using flash cards (for DD -- addition facts to 6 such as 2+4 and for LD subtraction cards such as 13-7) a player moves until he/she cannot move anymore. For example, if you move from the start place and move 4 spots and land on a "double move, the player then picks up a new card and moves that number of spots twice.  If they then land on a "move ahead 2," they move ahead. They keep moving until they land on a spot such as lose a turn, start, or stay put.  The object is to be the first person to land on one of the "win" spots.  It's a fast moving games and a lovely way to review math facts.

All three kids have had fun with the Math Mat recently.  ED (age 2 1/2) steps on the numbers as they are called out (with help from her brother and sister).  DD does the numbers and occasionally does the easy addition and LD does addition and subtraction trying to get as many points as possible.

Another game from Peggy Kaye's book, Games for Math, is called star count. LD and I have played this for the past couple of weeks.  On your turn, you roll the die and make that number of circles on your paper. Then it's the other player's turn.  On your second turn, you roll the die and draw that number of starts in each circle. The winner is the person who has the most stars.  A quick, easy game and a good intro to multiplication.

We've also been playing a lot of Math War these days (the person with the highest number wins that round).  There are some wonderful addition and subtraction cards at Confessions of a Homeschooler (called Add It! and Subtract It!) if you want to print your own.

DD still wants to play Sunny Side Up most every day!  Here are the directions again. Again, this is a great game for introducing your preschooler/kindergartner to double digit numbers.

Trash-o-saurus Measures in at 9 feet 9 inches by 4 feet 8 inches

We had so much fun with our huge dinosaur project.  A teacher on a website I saw somewhere (sorry, I forget where) mentioned having her class make a "trash-o-saurus."  I thought that was a brilliant idea, especially as we have SO much packing paper from our move.

We looked around the yard for some items to help us make the structure (bone system) of our dinosaur.  The previous owners left a lot of stuff back in the woods, so we scrounged up some left over wire fencing and formed that into a basic body.  We used sticks for the legs and attached it all together with plastic ties. (It got a head later.)

At that point it was time to bring it into the garage to start working on its "skin."  We used those packing papers (newspaper sheets) and a paper mache mixture to spread the sheets over the wires.

ED and DD worked with me every step of the way.  LD was quicker to lose interest in the paper-mache phase as he has never liked getting his hands "yucky" (even when he was a tot).

Here trash-o-saurus got meaty legs (wrapping bunches of paper around the sticks and keeping them on with duct tape.

On this day, trashosaurus got a styrofoam head which we attached and covered with more paper mache.

Posing with our finished dinosaur!

We worked on this project for two weeks about every other day. Obviously, I played a huge role in the momentum of this project, but boy do we ALL feel happy about the results. (Though LD made me chuckle when he asked, "Can we have some people over to see it? [a pause] But not kids, they'd just look at it and wouldn't be as interested in it as adults would." ... "You know it's like me, I just look at things and then walk on because I would rather play." (Hmmm... I guess we need to go to more art museums or something?!)

Have you made a trash-o-saurus? We'd love to hear from you in the comments below!
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You might be interested in our 60 page Dinosaur Packet with activities for 3-7 year olds.

Other Things to Keep Me Busy

Someone asked me a couple of days ago if I have any "girl time." (And she obviously meant for *me*!) I don't have too much in the way of outlets yet, but am getting a lot of pleasure out of working on the house and the yard.  The moving in process is now going forward at glacial speeds (as the kids take up a lot of my time and energy during the day).  But outside, I spend an hour or two four or five days a week working on things.

A couple of days ago I started working on the blueberry bed.  The picture above is the grassy hill (which is super-steep and nearly impossible to mow anyway) and this second picture shows my slow progress shoveling out sod and beating the dirt out. I managed to get about six feet by six feet cleared.  I have fond memories of my Mom and Dad doing this. We had a lot of gardens around our yard and my folks worked hard together to have fruit beds (blueberries, strawberries, apple and pear trees); a large vegie garden and general gardens with mountain laurel and rhododendrons.  Anyway, this bed I'm working on is for the blueberry bushes I mentioned the other day that'll be coming in the mail in a couple weeks.

Here LD is helping me get the dirt out of the sod clumps.  Once he lost interest I 'wondered' if we might ever come across Indian arrow heads like the ones our friend gave to us one year (he collects them semi-professionally).  LD lept on that and looked for arrowheads in the dirt as I dug!  That led to a good talk about Native Americans.  He didn't know much about Native Americans as we've just moved to the country and it was a great informal learning-session.  The best kind!  The kids also are learning a lot about gardening, soils, compost, what "healthy" soil is, the role ants/bugs/bacteria and such play in creating a healthy environment.  We looked at the rich dark soil under the leaves in the woods and compared that to the hard clay-like soil we've chosen for our blueberry bed.  The kids certainly are getting an idea of how hard farmers have to work (I've worked on this for a good 6-hours now!)

Mowing is also keeping me fit and active.  I split the lawn into three sections and each section takes me about an hour and a half to do. (We definitely need to get a ride-on mower when we can work it into the budget.)  In the last picture you can see the beams where I laid out a small path that I built.  It leads to the compost pile I set up last week.

I also meant to talk about other activities going on in our homeschool (math games and such), but as always I'm out of time!

I hope to post about trash-o-saurus later today too (hopefully)! It's been a fun project!
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Just a few nature shots from around the Homeschool Den:

This vine seems to be taking over! My aunt said she thought it was a kind of Morning Glory.

We have about a half-dozen frogs and a number of tadpoles in this tub at the moment.  We'll let them go back to the creek, but the kids sure do enjoy watching the frogs!

I believe it the frog above is a Pickerel Frog.  It is said to be toxic to some animals (and they can even poison each other in collecting jars). [Yes, we washed our hands VERY well after touching these!!]  I'm guessing the toad below is a Fowler's Toad.

LD misses his friends and especially wishes he could frog-hunt with his long-time friend, B, but the good news is we have met some other families who love nature and the outdoors as much as we do! The kids all had a good time hunting for critters yesterday in the creek/woods.

Dinosaur Body Structure Activity -- Marshmellows, Straws and Skewers

We came across a wonderful idea here to learn more about body structure and how dinosaurs had to be perfectly balanced to stand and move.  I read the paragraphs about the importance of balance and had the kids balance a ruler on their fingers and then add a light head and a heavy head (the heavy head made the ruler tip over and you can see the "head" falling off.  They roared at that!!)

From there we went on to do the marshmellow activity.  Of course, anything involving something so yummy is sure to be a hit, but believe it or not, they really learned a lot about how difficult it was to balance the head with the body.  And we all worked together to build a T-Rex... the kids understand how truly important the dinosaur tail was in achieving balance.

This is DD's Marshmellow Dinosaur

Here is LD's dinosaur

And in the end we were able to make a T-Rex of sorts!!

Measuring Dinosaurs Activity

We looked up the length of several well-known dinosaurs, grabbed our plastic models and then went outside to see how long they really were. We chose
stegosaurus 30 feet
T-Rex 40 feet
apatosaurus 90 feet
We looked at how long one foot was (we hadn't done measuring in feet before as we've used the metric system up until now) -- and then measured out the dinosaurs' lengths using a 20 foot piece of ribbon (though in the picture to the left, LD was using a one-foot piece to estimate where 30 feet was -- he came very, very close!).

That's a long way back to the tip of it's tail (at the bottom of the driveway!)

Dinosaur Fossils Impression Activity

At the beginning of our activity we looked at this real fern fossil (from Pennsylvania). We talked about how ferns have been around for millions of years and fossil records indicate they were around well before dinosaurs (we referred back to the chart we have on "what came first" from a previous day.)  Then we went into our woods and looked for different kinds of ferns for making our own fossil imprints.

We gathered our ferns and looked closely to see which one looked most like the shale fossil we had.

Using this cute coffee-clay recipe (below), we made impressions.  After a lot of tries, the kids decided ferns just didn't make a very good impression.  We talked about how conditions really had to be right for a fossil to be made.

Then we went on to make dinosaur tracks and trilobite impressions (I bought a plastic trilobite at the LaBrea Tar Pits in Los Angeles earlier this summer.)  Of course I pointed out to the kids that trilobites and dinosaurs were not around at the same time (and once again we looked at the chart of "what came first.") ED especially enjoyed this activity and spent well over an hour making dinosaur tracks again and again!

Lots of people probably know about this "rock" clay recipe which is great for making fossils, but it's worth sharing again here:
1/2 cup salt
1 cup flour
1/2 cup coffee
1 cup used coffee grounds
(I drank all my coffee that morning, so instead I put some coffee into a pot on the stove, brought it to a boil, let it cool a bit then added salt and flour.  I didn't follow the recipe exactly as written.)

Since we now live in a more humid area, I opted to bake our fossils slowly at 325 for 45-60 mins since we have it hanging around while we do our dinosaur unit. (But warning--it's smelly!!)

Lots of Dino Puzzles

In the past couple of weeks we read lots and lots of books about dinosaurs and have pulled out lots of different puzzles.

LD got this for his birthday a couple of years ago and it was just perfect to pull out for this unit!