weekly reviews have been lacking... math review

I think this weekend will mark the 3rd weekly review I have not done. We have been working but things have been busy so I have not taken the time.

I will try to do an update each day on different subjects...

Math: We are almost done with Singapore PM 1A. We have a few more sections but I am going to put those aside until we are back in CO... They are dealing with comapring liquids and weighing. I just do not have the resources here and it is not going to matter if it gets done now, or in 6 months, or sometime in between. She has a good sense with regards to those areas so I am not concerned. We will move through that parts that require now weighing/measuring and then do the rest later.

We have struggled a little with subtraction with regrouping (for example 13-6). Not so much she did not understand it but she was not doing it the way her curriculum wanted her to do it. Instead she created her own formula that when written out, actually involved negative numbers and such but it worked. So we are going to do a lot of online activities that work with this concept. Actually, she was able to do it on paper but when mentally doing it was when I figured out she was doing it differently. I was not sure how it would impact her work when we hit double and triple numbers so we went back and reworked on it the Singapore Math way. She understands it now but I want to keep working it to make sure it is concrete.

In the mean time, we had taken a break from the regrouping and I decided to challenge her again and see what she was capable of. She gets really excited when she is challenged. We had been working on the white board and realized that I had been giving her problems like 13-12 and she was missing them. I realized we had not covered that yet, she was trying to say 11. So we did a lot of 13-1 and 13-10 but using a lot of other numbers than 13 and it clicked. She was having trouble with the subtraction of the 10s place. So I started using numbers above 20 and slowly started doing stuff like 36-31 and so on, but nothing that required regrouping (borrowing). We also played around with addition, 32+31 as well as 38+43 and that clicked right away!

I then took advantage of that to show her that she could now add money including quarters! We had done dimes, nickels and pennies already. This also led into an intro on fractions and multiplication. I am not expecting it to stick yet but we will continue to ease. Her next semester curriculum eases into multiplication/division with pictures.