Middle School Math Journals and more!

I think if you have read any of my posts from the past on math, like this one, you would know that I struggle with ensuring a mathematics education. Having a very creative daughter, it has been even more of a struggle to ensure that she both enjoys math and yet has enough practice that math becomes skills rather than just concepts.

This has not been an easy balance, so this year I decided to try something very different and I think that it is actually working!!

First, I purchased two resources to get me thinking about math in a different way. I liked this Math Journal as this is very much an artistic experience, but I also liked this Hand’s On Interactive Math Journal which feels a little more like a Lap N’Note. I decided to purchase them both. I then read them and started to get some ideas how to even go about doing a math journal. 

In the past I had created some materials for math and so I began gathering some math activities that I had. I then went on the internet and found many creative math ideas like these ones. I have gone to Let’s Play Math many, many times and continue to refer to it. Living Math is also a fabulous site! I went through our Living Math books and purchased a few more, including Who Killed Professor X?

I went through all the manipulatives in our home and looked at which ones would be useful for Middle School.

Finally I purchased a few new spiral bound Sketch Books for the process.

In British Columbia we have our Learning Outcomes set out with Student Acheivement Indicators. These have been very helpful for me to understand what is required. They have also been helpful in understanding what types of journalling Elizabeth would need to do. I have gone through and made a master list of learning outcomes and we are working through them one by one!! This has been alot of work, but I know that it is worth it!! It will continue to keep me focussed on the concepts that need to be covered. 

Based on the topics, I then went to Teachers Pay Teachers to find some activities to go along with each outcome. There are 1667 free resources for Grade 8 Math alone!!

For each topic of learning I am trying to create opportunities for creative expression, concrete activities or games and finally practice, practice and practice! That is where I have been using this site - Math-Drills.com . It has a variety of free math worksheets on topics that are clearly set out. They include answer keys as well. This has been wonderful!!

Homemade math activity to explore integers through differences in temperature 

This year math is feeling so much more like a learning experience! Elizabeth is actually learning something and not just going through the pages of a math book with nothing actually sticking! I encourage you if you get discouraged about math, consider combining a creative math journal and applicable activities with math practice! I will keep you posted!!

Blessings!!
Natalie

Oh Math.... sigh...

I love math! I enjoy numbers - I was a Financial Advisor for years and much of what I did each day was about math! But somehow, math in our homeschool has eluded me, challenged me, frustrated me and given me a few tears now and then. 

The problem with me is I am constantly torn between three factors in math. The computational drill of math, the conceptual math and then the practical math. How much of each can I balance, how much of each should I include, how much of each is valuable and worthwhile given our techno age? 

We have used Math U See and I have found it to be an excellent program in the younger years especially for helping children to get place value firmly embedded in their math beginnings. Later when Math U See focusses on one topic in detail for an entire year it didn’t really fit for us.

We have used Discovery Education’s Discovering Math program and found it to really help math students to understand the application of each math concept. This was valuable for the concepts of math and in many ways practical math, but the lack of computation was a problem. I added in Daily Math Reviews like these to help with this. Because the videos cover 3 years, it was a one year commitment for us at each level as I couldn’t see our daughter watching the same videos over and over. 

We have used Singapore Math, which I truly believe is an excellent program, it just went too fast for our daughter as it got to the transition to middle school. 

I have looked into Living Math. I love the concept of learning math in a living way, but I never could really get this into a format that felt like a complete math program to me. We read lots of the living math recommended books though when our daughter was younger including the Cindy Neuschwander books, What’s Your Angle Pythagoras by Julie Ellis, The Math Start Books by Stuart Murphy and many of the “food” math books that are available. 

We have tried our best in practical math with cooking, budgeting, counting, subtracting, dividing, multiplying at home. We have had pattern blocks, money sets, dice, stopwatches, base 10 blocks, flashcards and lots of other math materials. We have played lots of games over the years including ones like Monopoly, The Game of Life, Settlers of Catan, lots of card games, Uno, and so many more. We have had many computer games and apps including Math Blaster, Math for the Real World and business games like DQ Tycoon.

So I ask myself, as you may be asking, why is math such a challenge....sigh...I think that it is searching for a feeling that our math is incremental enough, conceptual enough and practical enough and that there is a good measure of drill for those basic skills. All this and at the right pace, the right blend of manipulatives and the right amount of visuals. It’s a new year coming, and maybe this year I will find our ideal math program!! Right now we are using a combination of Math resources. It would be nice to have all that we need in one program, but I am getting more comfortable using many different resources. I will save our current math for another post,

Blessings!

The Art Fraud Detective Books - Why we have enjoyed these books so much!

Art Fraud Detective ,The Great Art Scandal and Art Auction Mystery by Anna Nilson are great books for not only learning more about art but learning many math skills as well. 

We have enjoyed these books so many times. They come out again after a year or two when everyone has forgotten “who did it” and again we enjoy the mysteries. 

The skills used in these books are keen observation, deduction, statistics, and data management. 

In each book there are different mysteries to be solved. For instance, in the book Art Fraud Detective there are several thieves who are part of certain gangs. You can look at the pieces of art, see the forgeries and then tell which gang they are a part of. You then deduce from your information, who was part of the forgeries and who was not. 

Finding the differences from the real painting and the forgery is a lot of fun. It is a search that can be sometimes obvious and sometimes very hidden! It means that you need to look at the paintings closely and that is wonderful for art study. 

These books are real treasures for those wanting to study art in a fun and engaging way! Blessings!