Manipulatives

The more I work with math and my children, the more I “get” why manipulatives work as well as they do. G just added 4332 and 2464 without even having the slightest idea when she sat down that she could do that. She sort of resisted at first, because although I presented the place value stampers as a game, she saw bigantous numbers and knew I was up to mischief. I am sure me telling her she was going to tell me the sum of those numbers didn’t help, but I was going for the shock value of her success. Well, mischief managed. She swiftly took over the stamping and told me the sum. Then she smiled.

I’ve read about children in Montessori environments doing advanced calculations swiftly and accurately, but I never really understood how that works– they’re just beads– until I began to show my own kids how it works. It’s a little unnerving to go into the unknown, but so satisfying when it works. And oh, how it works! I’ve not wanted to make / purchase the beads because I have felt that storing them in a home situation would be too unwieldy. Today, working with stamps of a similar design, I changed my mind. This was fabulous, and fast.

I didn’t spend a lot of time with manipulatives when I was a child, and math became a source of extreme difficulty for me. If you miss one small kernel of understanding, you lose the option of understanding most of what comes after. It makes me happy to see my kids not only just soak it up, but hold “math” in a sort of cavalier regard.

Lots of things to blog about

But blogging is just not happening until this wave of tummy-crankiness passes.

(and aside, I look forward to being a grup again, someone who would never utter, much less publish, the words “tummy crankiness”)

OK– one thing will make it in. We’ve gotten about half the school room re-installed. Actually, that’s less than accurate, because I have a great many new materials the children haven’t seen yet. Yesterday, P-daddy took the doppelgangers out while ~N~ and I stayed home with our weak constitutions. We used that time to great advantage, really enjoying being together. He and I worked together in the school room for at least an hour, with me introducing some cool Montessori math stuff, among other things. (I love it when 5 year olds truly understand the quantity of, say, 4322. It trips me out.)

I don’t know what happened while they were gone, or whether D-person just misses me from being laid out all week, but he came home to be a very affectionate tyke. He let me carry him about and just squeezed me really hard before explaining to me that “You my teeeeech-ah. You my teeeech-ah, Mommy!”

So, I have lost eleven pounds this week and had our daughter explain to us out of the blue that the sun glows bright because hydrogen is converted into helium. My P-daddy has taken exquisite care of his infirm family without reverting to testiness. We spent the evening yesterday rolling about in the living room as a family, laughing. It’s been a balanced, pleasant week.

We rang in the New Year with a stomach bug

Initially we thought it was D-boy (sniff sniff no longer D-baby) having drunk too much salinated pool water at the Y, but 48 hours later, ~N~ wiped out. After staying up until 3.30 am to help him, I had to go to sleep. An hour after P-daddy switched off with me, I started going. At least the flu itself is FAST– literally 24 hours– but I am weak and sore today. Now, we wait for ~G~ and P-daddy to fall. Hopefully they won’t, but I sure wasn’t expecting what I got, either. My brilliant daughter has followed my instructions and is hydrating herself to the nth just in case.

I will choose to celebrate this as a New year’s purge. We’re quite literally shedding the old, and opening ourselves to the new. And I got to lose all my holiday overindulgence along the way.

Attack of the Birthday Boy

He’s THREE!