Help By Subject: Math

Homeschool with Tangrams

Tangrams are simple seven-piece puzzles that build visual-spatial skills. Kids and adults alike enjoy manipulating the standardized pieces in the set, which includes a parallelogram, a square, and three sizes of right triangles. The pieces can be fit together to form a square, and in fact, when the puzzle pieces are made of wood, they are often stored in a square wooden frame. The real fun and thinking occur while moving the shapes around to form “pictures” or shapes. There is a real challenge in matching shapes that are already drawn out as puzzles to solve. Read More »

What I Learned about Homeschooling from Saxon Math

As you may have read over on my personal blog, I’m thinning my library of homeschooling books, and it’s an occasion for reflection. One of the things I finally feel free to do is to pass along my copy of Saxon Math. Saxon didn’t work for us. In fact, it didn’t work in dramatic ways. We had multiple reasons for beginning homeschooling, but among the academic reasons was that the math taught at school was a poor fit and created a lot of stress and little math learning. Read More »

Learning Multiplication by Hand: Manipulating Math

In Instead of Curriculum: Math Games, I described some of the games I played with my sons to help them learn and practice their multiplication facts. Today, I’ll tell about some of the hands-on tools homeschoolers use to help their kids make sense of the basic concept of multiplication as well as related multiplication facts. Read More »

High School Homeschooling: Our 10th Grade Plan

From the feedback and questions that we get on our Facebook page, there is a great deal of interest in how to homeschool high school. This year my daughter is a sophomore in high school, and I thought it might be helpful to share our 10th grade plan with you. Contrary to popular belief, homeschooling high school is often easier than homeschooling younger grades. Students are older, more mature, and better able to manage their own academics. When they need assistance, the material is more difficult, but between teacher guides, online resources, and friends with a knowledge of the subject ... Read More »

Instead of Curriculum: Math Games (Fun Multiplication Practice!)

You can drill and kill the times tables to help your kids learn multiplication facts – or you can play math games with them. Here are some of the math games that helped our sons practice multiplication painlessly. Read More »

Benefits of Homeschooling: Changing Curriculum, Again

I am going to be a math curriculum expert before this whole homeschooling thing is over. Yep, we are now on our third math program in four years. This isn’t how I planned it, but then, does anything in homeschooling go according to plan? I would have liked to have begun a math program in Kindergarten and stuck with it, at least through the sixth grade. That would have helped me be able to avoid repetition, progress more efficiently, and be able to keep a more accurate assessment of exactly what she was mastering. Read More »

Bringing in the Cavalry

If you home school long enough, you will likely come across a learning obstacle for your child that makes you want to bang your head against the wall. You use different programs, you use creative learning techniques, you incentivize, you, um, maybe yell a little… All to no avail. Your child just. doesn’t. get. it. For us, this concept was number sequencing. My second grade right-brain oriented, creative global thinker just could not get it. She can rock geometry like a star, write three-point expository paragraphs without assistance, and sew her own doll clothes. But she cannot count numbers in ... Read More »

Instead of Curriculum: Living Math

Why do some homeschoolers choose not to use one of the many complete math curricula available today? And what do they do instead? To many homeschooling parents, math feels like the one thing that must be taught and learned in a systematic way even for very young children. Even many people who are otherwise attracted to or influenced by a version of interest-based learning or unschooling often say– “except for math.” Read More »

What is Memory and How Does it Work?

Memory and Math: Multiplication – There comes a point where your times tables MUST be memorized. You want students to be able to instantly recall all of their math facts – faster than a calculator! Read More »

Big Topics Feed Kids’ Brains

Just try talking about an issue of substance in front of your kids. If they’re like mine, they dig right in with questions and opinions. That’s what makes dinner table conversation so lively. No surprise, research says that family discussions about current issues boost kids’ reasoning and mathematical skills. Unlike more casual chats, conversations about social and political concerns help kids make sense of big concepts including numbers. That’s because parents tend to give examples, use real life mathematics, and ask children to think for themselves. Read More »

Make 3-D Mathematical Models Using Paper Plates

Mention paper plate projects to my kids and they’re likely to scoff. That’s because well-intended adults cheerfully made them suffer through paper plate crafts when they were small. But they’re intrigued by the complexity of Bradford Hansen-Smith’s paper plate designs. Read More »

More Right-Brained Math Ideas

While arithmetic may seem simple to children with left-brain characteristics, right-brain oriented learners often struggle with basic math in traditional classroom settings, which are more geared toward left-brained learners. Fortunately, math does not have to be difficult for these learners! Homeschoolers can use curricula, techniques, and strategies that can help the right-brained child learn math effectively. Read More »

Right-Brained Math

Arithmetic operations are foundational to future math learning, so it is critical that kids master math facts. Yet often homeschoolers find that at least one child has difficulty with math, and that they have hit a wall. For a large majority of children who find arithmetic difficult, it is simply a matter of how the child processes information. Learning specialist Dianne Craft has found that 80% of struggling learners are right brain dominant, due to the fact that most curriculum and learning settings are oriented toward the left-brain oriented individual. Read More »

The Language of Math

Because I’m an author, some people often wonder if it was ever a challenge to grow up with a mom who loved numbers the way I loved words. My mom taught high school math for thirty years but, the truth was, my mother loved language as much as she loved math. One of the great gifts of my childhood was that she taught me to see math as another language — one of nuance and beauty, of games, of wonderful problem solving, of questions and answers, of getting logically from point A to point B. Now, I’m ... Read More »

Are You Mathphobic?

I don’t know about you, but I’m claustrophobic, aviatophobic and aquaphobic, which means I’m afraid of enclosed spaces, flying and drowning. That’s why you’ll never catch me flying to Miami so I can board a ship for an around-the-world cruise. But one fear I don’t have that many people do is arithmophobia, which is the fear of arithmetic. For the sake of simplicity, let’s call those people mathphobic. Read More »

New Year’s Goal Setting and Math Add Up to Higher Grades for Students!

Teaching math is one of the greatest ways to instill valuable goal-setting skills while ensuring academic success. Math provides the perfect opportunity for goal-setting lessons: its aims are realistic, obtainable, measurable and can be broken down into smaller goals or tasks. Developing goal-setting skills will help students learn how to manage their time, make better decisions and take ownership of their own academic progress. Read More »