Leap Day Math

I'm trying to be better about "fun" things for the kids, like crafts and holiday activities.   Since today was leap day, I decided that we were going to try to do a little "leaping of our own to go along with our CC memory work for math.  This week our memory math is 1 inch equals 2.54 centimeters.  First, I made up a batch of cook play dough.  I've used this recipe before and it's never given me any trouble, but due to a lack of flour I halved it and it was SUPER sticky this time.  After cooking it, I added a ton of green glitter.  The goal was to make "Frogs" for our place value lily pad game, but the dough turned out really sticky, even though it looked fantastically glittery and fun :) 

We had a few friends come by in the afternoon, so they were subjected to our math games, too! Everyone lined up at the corner of a wall and then did their best "leap".  We marked it with a construction paper lily pad and then measured in centimeters and inches.  Logan wrote his own numbers and name.  He's doing really well with his printing and starting to feel more confident writing, especially in front of others!!

Our hypothesis was incorrect- we guessed that the person with the longest legs would leap the furthest, but Logan and Riley jumped equal distances!!

Next we did a game with place value.  I made lily pads labeled "ones", "tens" and "hundreds".  Since our play dough didn't work out, we used our Singapore math cubes in green.  The kids rolled a die to see how many "frogs" went on each lily pad.  For Logan, we just did ones and tens and then he wrote the number on the white board and told me the name.  For Katie Marie and Riley, they used all three pads (and I added a "thousands" one) and took turns rolling to add more to the pads from the roll before.  This meant they had to swap sets of 10 out for 1 of the next place value up.  Even Savannah played, rolling a number and then counting out the appropriate number of "froggies" for her ones lily pad.

Pretty fun!!

CC Week 16 and 17: Math Dinner

One of the things I've been trying to work on is doing more "fun" stuff.  Since we're not what I call "called" homeschoolers- poeple who homeschool for purely religious reasons- I focus a lot on shoving academics into my kids' heads and tend to not make things as fun as I have time to since we homeschool. (PS- Don't get me wrong, we love Jesus, it's just that he wasn't optional no matter what type of school they went to!)  I'm also absolutely horrific at making sure we do crafts, but that's a note for another day.  For CC Cycle 3 Week 16 and Week 17, our math was about circle formulas. 

 When I went to pick Savannah up at preschool one day during Week 16, I stopped at the Bloom because Austin was working from home so I had a few moments to run in and grab things.  It ended up being a massive (and odd) shopping trip because the store was closing and everything was 75% off!! I've recently gotten to meet the very fabulous woman who writes BeltwayBargainMom.com and I feel like she would have been proud of this key lime pie that I got for $1.27! I don't usually buy pre-made baked goods, but it was so cheap!! And thus, an idea was born for a circle dinner.

 We used the ruler to measure diameter and then plugged in the appropriate numbers to solve for circumference.  We then divided by 5 (the number of people in our family) and made very even pie pieces by using a string to mark the appropriate number of centimeters for each family member's slice.

We marked each cut with a magic marker.  Our dinner included an odd mix of circular foods, and for all of them we calculated something and shared.  It was fun because it made the math "worthwhile" for them- equal sharing of foods mommy doesn't typically put out is a crucial life skill :)