Over the weekend, I assigned Babe a fun estimation exercise that I remember doing practically every year of elementary school - counting M&Ms!!!
I put some mini M&Ms in a plastic container and told each family member to guess how many were in it. They went above and beyond and ended up guessing how many of each color were in there, too! It seemed like they had fun over the weekend with it. I looked over their guesses and had to laugh at Bubs's guess - 2000. That would be her heaven, her being a chocoholic and all. Anyway, Babe had some pretty good guesses herself.
I began the lesson by laying out six paper plates around the table. Then I had all the kids sort them by color. Even Z was helping for a few minutes! Everyone did an awesome job.
After they were all sorted by color, we went around the table again and I asked Babe which color she thought there were the most of. She guessed yellow, which was different from her original estimation. Then I asked her which color there were least of, and she guessed brown, which was also different from her original guess.
Then I showed Babe an easy way to organize each color to make it easy to count. She can count by tens, so I had her put each color of M&Ms into rows of 10.
Like so.
Then we started counting! We went through each color and she wrote down each one until we had six numbers! Before we added them all up, I had her build a bar graph using connecting blocks - one block for every ten M&Ms. She got the hang of that pretty quick and by the third color she was doing it herself.
Once the bar graph was made, I expressed how much easier it was to see which color had the most (yellow) and which color had the least (orange) because of the size of the bars. She agreed.
"Look at how red is just barely touching yellow, because there were almost the same red as yellow M&Ms!"
She was right! The difference was only three M&Ms!!! Amazing.
After the bar graph was complete, we did the real math. I taught her very simple two-digit addition a few months ago, and she remembered how to do that, but this was much harder because of the whole carrying-the-one issue. So before we even started this math, I told her that it was completely OK if she didn't understand it. I needed to let her know that so she wouldn't get frustrated two minutes in.
She said OK, and we used two sets of hands (mine and hers) to do all the adding up. By the last number, she was understanding how to carry the one and did the very last sum herself! Just to check all the math, I had her use a calculator. She was so proud that her number matched the calculator's number!
So voila! Here's all the math!
That was a really fun morning. Bubs was dying to eat every M&M when we were done, but she settled for one of each color, as did Z and Babe...and me.
After math was completely done, we did our quick little lesson/discussion on the color of the day: orange.
After lunch, we had very little time to do the rest of the day's work, so we rushed through a reading of the wordless story, "My Red Boat." Babe, again, did very well with that.
We did little practice with the word I, very little practice with beginning sounds, and by the time we finished that, I had no time for Science. That will be saved for another day.
So I handed her a book on colors to add to her reading log. "What Color is Nature?" by Stephen R. Swinburne was a really neat book on where you can find all the colors in the rainbow - basically everywhere! It seemed a very easy read for Babe. She is getting very good, especially with sounding out words she doesn't know yet. She read "salamander" and "surrounded", both completely new words, with ease by sounding out each letter! I was very impressed.
By the time she finished, it was time for dance. And I was ready for a nap.
Here's to me learning how to slow down for tomorrow!
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