Almost Unschooling Grama

  Mighty Red is now pretty much an independent adder. We started out with him on my lap as his sister and I played math games. He would move the pieces while I gave the answers. Then we moved to him copying me as I did the finger math. For the past several weeks, we have been doing the problems on our fingers together, but this week he announced that he could do this and just took off without me! When I was in school, having someone help me like I have helped Mighty Red would have been shameful and "cheating". Go ahead, help your kids "cheat". It works!

When my older two went to the local high school, they did so well in math that the teacher is still certain that I must be a math major. The truth is, I flunked out of math in high school. We are pretty good friends, but this teacher still thinks I’m lying  My secret? Throw out the math books. Until you get into the upper-level subjects like Algebra and Geometry, there is only one of good use for math books – to cut word problems out of to put in a box so the kids can draw them out at random. There may be a few people out there who learn math well the way math texts are set up, but for most of us, they are set up to confuse. Why they teach addition only for 3 weeks and then switch to subtraction only for 3 weeks is beyond me. Most kids are just starting to catch on to the addition by the time they switch. Then by the time they are starting to catch on to the subtraction, they switch back to addition the kids have forgotten how to do that by then! To make matters worse,...