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Tonight after the girls were in bed and Melissa and I had a few minutes to catch up, Melissa mentioned that Sara has been “all about numbers” lately.  Figuring out how much older Melissa’s brother is than she and her sister (calculating the difference), working on time, etc.  If true, this is big!  When she notices numbers in real life and does calculations to better understand relationships of daily life, math is becoming part of her being.

We are officially at the half way mark of our summer math intensive. I am amazed with our progress and the program seems to get easier every day. An unexpected benefit of the program is how much closer Sara and I have become. Sara’s affection can wax and wane – if I’m working a lot it can wane, when I help her accomplish something it can wax. These last few weeks she’s been very affectionate, helpful and mostly fun to be around.

On the academic side, I believe that if we stop where we are right now, Sara would be ready for second grade math. But since last year really messed up Sara’s views of math, we are going to keep plugging along so it doesn’t happen again in second grade.

With the progress we are making, I think we can get about half way through second grade math in the next month and a half. I’m learning to be more efficient with our lessons and have found some great workbooks for Sara to complete while I’m at work. My biggest efficiency tool so far has been setting up a weekly lesson plan. Now we are hitting every topic at least once a week, our focus topics 2-3 times and flash cards and number spelling every day.

Last week I purchased a board game based on a book that inspired me in my early entrepreneur days: Rich Dad / Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki. This game is for children 6 and up; they have an adult version as well. In this game kids learn about passive income (Kiyosaki’s main lesson in finance), assets and liabilities. Kids get to make choices on whether they invest their hard earned money on stocks, businesses or real estate or to keep their cash.

It’s evident very quickly that investing money is how to make your money work for you. I loved seeing Sara have to make the decision of whether to give up her money for a new business or to keep her cash. By nature, she wanted both; the business and her cash. These financial connections in her brain are going to help her understand money and prepare her to be independently wealthy in life.

In addition to the money aspect of the game, there is tons of math; adding two dice, making change for money, figuring how much money you get at each pay day, etc. Sara was able to get a lot of the math quickly vs having to figure each problem (another small victory to celebrate). The best feature of the game is that Sara has been bugging me to play it every day!

Our major goals for this week are:

– Spelling numbers up to fourteen

– Geometry – 2D vs. 3D and introduction to polygons

– Measurement; differentiate weight, volume and distance

– Carrying numbers – addition

– Subtraction intensive

Update on Sophia’s math: At this point she recognizes her numbers up to 6, can match objects with their corresponding number, knows her basic colors and shapes and can almost count to 20. I’m beginning to work on addition concepts and she seems to be getting them quite well. The biggest issue I’m seeing is with her writing; she can’t seem to write her numbers consistently.

So far, I can say that this summer math program has been a rich experience for everyone. The girls are learning very quickly and I think they are beginning to like learning, I’m figuring out how to teach at the 2nd and Kindergarten levels and I believe we, as a family are becoming closer.

I have two scriptures which inspired me for this post. This first one is back to the basics “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.” (Exodus 20:12). My revelation on this scripture is that there are two parties with responsibilities to this commandment – the parents who need to be honorable (teachers and examples) and children, who by honoring their honorable parents will have richer and longer lives.

Which dovetails with Proverbs (22:6) “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.” Seeds of education, relationship and honor planted now will effect our children for their whole lives.

After further consideration, a small compliment isn’t the pinnacle of my teaching career; it’s a major step but not the pinnacle. We’ll call the pinnacle when my girls are multiple grades ahead of their classmates in math and American history. So, Hi-Ho, Hi-Ho, it’s back to math we go.

Lessons are becoming easier; less fussing from Sara before and during. Also noticed that she isn’t writing “NO MATH” in her journal anymore (we celebrate small victories!). We are still doing 2 lessons per day 7 days per week. I know that we will never do all of them but if we miss a few lessons for some reason I’m not too concerned because 10 lessons a week is plenty. I’m also noticing that Sara is able to engage with lessons much longer than she used to. Lessons used to be 10 minutes before she was done, now we are up to around 20 minutes and we can hit 6-7 exercises in that time.

I’m finding the recipe that works for Sara is a couple warm up lessons (flash cards, 10 square, worksheet) that we do repetitively so they are easy for her. We then review the prior lesson activities and introduce a new lesson. I may switch the lesson to be second so she doesn’t tire out learning something new.

My business partners wife (who is a homeschooler) gave me the book Logic Links (the picture for this post). You order colored circles to answer a logic question. For example, the green circle only touches the white circle and is directly to the right of the blue circle. She thinks it’s so much fun that I actually bribed her with it yesterday. I told her that if she did her lessons, we could do the Logic Links book, she dropped what she was doing and sat down at the lesson table.

The million-board (aka mil-board) is working fabulously for naming large numbers, number placement and addition of large numbers. We just learned how to carry numbers in addition…easy!

I’m working on a new geometry board and fractions board, may be my best creations yet. I’ll share when I’m done.

My relevant quote for today is Proverbs 10:4 “A slack hand causes poverty, but the hand of the diligent makes rich.”

Yesterday after Sara’s lesson we started working with Sophia on her lessons. As usual, I let Sara run the lesson and I’d help guide a little.

Sara turned to me and said “you’re good that this, you should be a teacher.” And just like that, I hit the pinnacle of my teaching career. It’s clearly time for me to retire.

I guess any teaching capabilities I may have can be attributed to my parents, both teachers. My mom has been retired for 15 years and when she visits, can’t resist teaching our girls lessons. The games, methods, tools are awesome; she has such a well of experience to pull from.

At the end of the day, there isn’t teaching; only learning. Whatever works to help our kids learn is what we as parents need to do….constantly.

You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise (Deuteronomy 6:7).

Footnote: After Sara’s beautiful compliment, I had to teach her a lesson on finances ….”if I were a teacher, we wouldn’t be able to live in this nice house and mommy would have to get a job.” Then I got a lesson in optimism when Sara replied “no we wouldn’t.” Life is a continual lesson.

My business mentor always used to say “know your audience.” This is the most basic and important rule of business presentation (or any presentation for that matter). There are a million ways to present a topic but if it doesn’t attract the audiences attention, you’ve just wasted your breath and everyone’s time.

Apparently the same goes for 1st grade math. Sara is a creative person, she loves to draw, color, create beautiful things from stuff she finds in the yard and flower beds and sometimes from junk in the garbage can. I can’t count the number of times that I’ve been in the process of throwing something away and Sara stops me and says we can use that for an art project.

She sees how colors, shapes, patters and objects fit together to make art. That’s why memorizing 8+5=13 is difficult for her – it’s abstract with no context…and in her words…”boring.”

So tonight I brought out the Big Kahuna, the Billy Baroo (think Caddyshack) of math tools….the Million Board. I specifically made this board big with bright colors and moveable foam numbers for my little creative princess. In one short lesson, she learned how to say any number in the millions (213,875,909 for example). She also learned how to add two numbers that were in the millions (we don’t carry yet). I was ecstatic with the ease that she learned these concepts.

Then it happened. Not by design or could I have ever predicted it.

She began having fun and creating with the million board. We tried to stump each other on creating the biggest number possible and as you see from the photo on this entry, she created an alien with 3 eyes, sitting on Saturn, looking at the moon with a spaceship in the distance. She spent 15 minutes creating this numeric master piece.

Could math actually be fun?

I’m not sure if the outer space adventure has a direct line to actual math but I do know that she was having fun with math tools and numbers. If she is excited about our morning lesson tomorrow, I will conclude that there is a direct line to learning when math and art collide.

“it is the glory of God to conceal a matter but the glory of kings to search out a matter” Proverbs 25:2

Life is a continual learning experience. As I try to see life and learning from my children’s eyes I see that they are bombarded with a tremendous amount of new information, most they have no context for so it just bounces off. I suppose this carries on to adulthood as well – if we weren’t selective on what we engage in we would go insane from information overload.

There are concepts that I want to teach which are way beyond where Sara is in her learning capacity. But I also believe that with the right exposure to these concepts, her future point of view will grow around the lessons.

Today was the first day that Sara really didn’t want to do her math lessons. The last thing I want to do is make math something she dreads even more than she does now. So we can either make it really fun or we can bribe her. Ok, so I’m going to try a little of both. On the bribe side I took a technique from the movie Coach Carter, where Samuel L. Jackson (aka Coach Carter) had the team sign a contract – they do well in school, they can play basketball, if they don’t they won’t play basketball. I figure those kids had about the same education level as Sara, so I taught her the basic components of a contract: two people agree on something and want to put it in writing – it says what both people are going to do. In this case, Sara is going to do math lessons twice per day without fussing and help Sophia with her lessons, in exchange at the end of the summer I will buy her a build-a-bear… fully accessorized. Contract signed by both parties.

We also talked about the concepts in Psalms 15:4 – “Who swears to his own hurt, but does not change.” When you give your word that you are going to do something, you need to do it, even if it hurts.

My hope for teaching contracts to Sara at this young age is that when she says she will do something, that not doing it isn’t an option. Somethings kids will learn in school, others like strength of character and honor are best taught by their parents.

I own a business and work at it M-F from 8-6 (or so) so I don’t have the luxury of being able to spend all day making math toys and teaching my topics. So to make this work, it has to be efficient. My theory is that working on math for a few minutes a couple times a day, every day is more effective than a long, drawn-out session every once in a while.

My schedule right now is to do a lesson for 10-12 minutes before I leave for work and 10-12 minutes after dinner. In that span of time I seem to be able to review the past lesson and hit two topics pretty easily. Every lesson has addition/subtraction plus one other topic. There’s definitely a trend to the equations that Sara struggles with, so we’ll be sure to hit those every lesson until she has them cold.

This weekend, I spent most of my Saturday planning, buying and building math tools. I was able to get materials for seven projects and get a good start on some of them. As tempting as it is for me to show Sara all of my cool new toys, I’m really trying to only show her as we use them to keep the lessons fresh and new.

Sara’s first grade teacher gave her a 1st and 2nd grade math workbook to work on this summer. So while I’m working on the tools, we are using the workbook. Knowing we only have two and a half months of summer home schooling, perfection and utopia curriculum gets thrown out the window; we are fast and furious.