OK, I obviously really suck at blogging here lately. I dropped off the song of the week thing, I haven’t posted regularly in forever, and I just don’t even remember I have this blog frankly. I do still blog at my main blog, if anyone’s interested.

Anyway, I still do believe strongly in unschooling, but I’m facing a little reality here…I’m not organized nor consistent enough to do all that I really need to be doing to really have a quality unschooling environment for my children. Its far too easy for me to just get sucked into housework and my own projects and neglect setting up the environment and opportunities for enrichment for my children.  Read more... (943 words, 0 images, estimated 3:46 mins reading time)

I’ve been really disappointed in myself recently (again) for falling off the wagon and getting caught up in life and not getting back to Maeven’s math curriculum. Well, wonder of wonders (not such a surprise to all you unschoolers out there)…she’s still doing math!

Well of course she is! DUH! Math is a big part of life, for pete’s sake! But it still never ceases to amaze me. Recently she’s been telling me the answers to equations she just thinks up in her head. And then she’ll tell me how she got the answer. She’s using the techniques I taught her from the Right Start Math program!

Yesterday she told me that 6 plus 8 was 14. And then she told me that the way she knew that was because she imagined in her head making the 6 a 4 and a 2…then adding the 2 to the 8 because she knew that made 10…and then she knew she had 4 left over and 10 and 4 was 14! Yup, she’s getting it! And she was so proud of using the technique I’d taught her!  Read more... (195 words, 0 images, estimated 47 secs reading time)

we’ve been working on making a cotter ten fractal for maeve’s latest math lesson (yes, that link takes you to someone who’s using the same curriculum, apparently, because that’s exactly what we’re working on)…and according to the book this should take “2-3 days”….well, i think they might have meant if you got a group to help you…since they recommend this is a good project to do in a group…well its taking FOREVER! ay yi yi! we get sidetracked and don’t get back to it for a couple days and then we get fed up with the gluing after just a few of the ten triangles.

well, the idea is this…you print up a bunch of pages of these little triangles…those are the ones. then you use 10 of those little triangles to build a 10s triangle…then guess what… 10 of the 10s triangles to build a 100 triangle. then, yup, you guessed it…10 of the 100 triangles to build the 1000 triangle!  Read more... (380 words, 0 images, estimated 1:31 mins reading time)

having a little difficulty with maeven’s math right now. nothing huge, but its something i need to work on. the problem is that she’s still counting while figuring out math problems. that’s not what she’s supposed to be doing in the rightstart math program. i had sorta known this but last week when i did a lesson with her that ended in a little practice work, i saw her even counting for the problems where she’s only adding 1 to the number…and i know she could do this quicker because we’ve been doing the “what comes after” game for weeks where i say a number and she tells me, as fast as she can, what number comes after it.  tonite i was thinking about this and realized she might not have put those 2 things together in her head yet to figure out that that’s what adding 1 is doing, just telling what the next number is. so tomorrow i’m going to make it a point to talk to her about this.  Read more... (550 words, 0 images, estimated 2:12 mins reading time)