Friday, October 21, 2011

Playing Rightstart Math Games with Tom Thumb


With all the math I've been doing with Red, Tom Thumb has been eagerly eyeing the box of math manipulatives.  He begged me today to take them out so reluctantly I gave it a shot.  I really wasn't sure that he was old enough, but he proved me wrong!  


To get started (because I needed a refresher on the preschool stuff), I took out the Rightstart A lesson manual.  I bought Rightstart A starter kit a couple of years ago for Red.  I really appreciate the way Rightstart incorporates lots of manipulatives and games to make math fun!  The lessons sometimes can be lengthy so for the sake of time we switched to Singapore this year for Red.  


The first few lessons involve recognizing quantities using fingers, beads, and tally sticks.  Tom Thumb and I ran threw the first few lessons with no problem, and we were having a great time to boot!  He loves building things with the tally sticks (AKA popscicle sticks) when we're not using them.  We enjoyed playing Memory with the quantity cards the most.  We took the stack of tally stick and bead cards (they go up to 10), laid them all face down, and matched up.  Here's an example of what those cards look like.  I made these myself from card stock by copying some appendix pages in the lesson book.  Each of these cards represent the quantity 9.
  Then, we applied what we learned by entering quantities on the abacus.
Who knew we could have such a great time doing math?  
I'm betting that this won't be a one day thing.  :-)

3 comments:

Jenny said...

How old do you think a child needs to be for Level A?

Fairy Tale Mama said...

I think Level A can easily be started with a 4 year old as long as you're willing to give them a pass on the writing if needed. There are some lessons about learning how to write your numbers fairly early on. We breezed through the first five lessons with no problem. I'm prepared to slow down or stop for a while if we hit a wall. I'll let you know how it goes.

Jenny said...

Just to follow up, today I downloaded the first few lesson plans from Level A. My DD is not ready by a long shot!

This is what happened: http://teachingmybabytoread.blog.com/2011/11/18/does-your-two-year-old-know-the-quantity-3/