Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Homeschooling, 1st week

Well, we just finished our first week of homeschooling.( M- 7 yrs old, O- 4 yrs old). The first day we created a schedule for a week, full of all different types of activities, as well as a weekly menu. Needless to say, the rest of the week had very little resemblance to what we planned for. The first day we spent too much time on math , trying to get back into the school mood, and the rest of the day on baking apple pies. M. actually learned how to break an egg and it made her very excited. O. tried to help as much as he could, running around in circles and constantly asking : " Do you want your life to be hard? If not, why can not I help you?". When allowed to help, he would try to mix together everything he could get a hold of, creating an unbelievable mess. We finished the day with a visit to a playground.
The next couple of days we did some spelling, (M. learned how to use an electronic dictionary), created a spreadsheet in the Open Office application for our weather forecast comparison project, borrowed a French activity book and CD from a library to dust off M.'s French, read some of the "Just so stories", registered and participated in Kids Book Club in the library, taught O. the names of the planets, domino and simple card games, read a fairy tale in Russian, worked on finding a main idea of the paragraph, and played a lot outside. And yes, we do yoga every morning to start off in the right mood.
Well, M. seems to like it a lot. I am somewhat confused by the lack of any structure, though - if we continue in this chaotic way, is it good for a child's brain?
Uff.

Thursday, September 3, 2009

The flying circus of physics

This book completely mesmerized me when I was a high schooler. Now I found it again http://www.flyingcircusofphysics.com/, with author's blog etc
What a wonderful thing.


Sunday, August 23, 2009

number gossip

Just found that in Tanya's Khovanova blog (http://blog.tanyakhovanova.com/?page_id=2)

Number gossip - try this with your kids : http://www.numbergossip.com/

Non-standard problems

Going over non-standard math problems ( math riddles) books, I notice that they do repeat from book to book. Some of the problems are really ancient, they come to us from the indian and arabic tales, old monastery textbooks, etc. This makes me think that
1. they are non-trivial in any educational system
2. they tell us something about our brain
3. it is not trivial to come up with this type of problems.

So, my question is
1. what makes these problems non-trivial?
2. where are the people who know how to generate these problems?
3. how could I learn to generate these problems?

You inputs are welcome!
Best regards,
Julia

Saturday, July 4, 2009

with straight lines

There are different problems that involve cutting. This one is a good one for young kids: how many pieces you could get while cutting a pie with 3 straight cuts? ( try to find all the solutions)
My kids were happy to explore this, even my 4 year old.

Monday, June 29, 2009

Math and science links for kids

Here are some links I find useful:

Math Kangaroo Olympiad

AIMS Educational Foundation

National Associations of Math Circles

Puzzles.com

The Logic Zone

National Library of Virtual Manipulatives

Los Alamos Mega Mathematics Project

Brainboosters


Young Inventors' Competitions

TryEngineering.org Games

Rockville Consortium for Science

Kids Science Challenge

Discovery Education

Digits, loved and hated

Yesterday my 7 year old daughter told me that there are digits she loves, and digits she hates. There are also digits that are so-so.
So, we assigned each digit a score ( -1,0 or 1) and tried to analyse long numbers with those scores.
For example, she says that she loves 5, hates 7 and is OK with 4.
Will she love 5547? ( yes, t0tal score is 1+1+0-1=1)
Will she love 7745474?
And so on.
We had a lot of fun.
You could also make it more complicated introducing scores in between, etc, graphing it and so on.