Hope4Grace

Wednesday, March 03, 2010

Challenges Galore

Duchess and I are doing one on one math right now. Since we began homeschooling in the middle of the Christmas break, I ordered them their corresponding years worth of books through Abeka. So we make sure to do reading and math everyday while doing work on the other subjects throughout the week.

What really has me boggled is Duchess' math abilities. Her teacher when we parted ways gave me her progress report and her year end goals. She was working on subtraction. First grade subtraction. So even though we began our homeschooling journey in the middle of the year, I had Duchess start at the beginning of her 1st grade math book so that we could see exactly where her abilities were and if she needed any additional help before we moved on to harder things.

She nailed the addition and subtraction: in the weeks since we began HS or mommy is in charge of your education: as I like to call it, Duchess has shown signs of being a sponge.

In January, we began money counting, today she made 100% on her final money counting review. This past weekend, she counted up the cash in Dave's wallet for fun. Today she informed me sadly that all I had in my purse was $1.24 so I should hit the ATM. :) The kid is all about it. We also covered before and after numbers, skip counting by 2, 5, and 10's. She got that too.

In Feb., we began time counting the old fashioned way. She quickly grasped the hour hand, although we had to stop using my wristwatch as an example cause the second hand was too distracting for her, she'd continue to change her answer as it went clicking by. She then got the half-hour, 15 minute intervals and this past week she nailed the minutes totally. Today she took her big time test after we did review with flashcards. She kicked it's ever loving butt with 100%. Starting to get a little scary.

Today, I decided while looking through the book to move her ahead a couple chapters past the time/money/addition/subtraction reviews to greater/than less than. I wanted to challenge her and decided to use new stuff and intermingle it with reviews weekly on the previous stuff to keep it fresh. So I sat down and drew out a greater/than less than chart. Except my chart had little teeth and tails showing how the "mouth" side was always hungry for the bigger number and the "tail" side was pointing to the littler number. She thought this was hysterical and we cut out a greater/less than sign out of our foam paper and set down to play some games. She got it. Then she blew through her practice test. Ouch, sponge.

So I pulled out the big guns. I set up the double digit addition with the occassional carry to see if I could wipe that "I got this" grin off her face. Ummm, I got her. Except after the first one, she didn't need my help and proceeded to nail the entire list. Big time sponge.

So I sent her off to color and play while Princess and I sit down to go over her math. Lord help me, but honestly I see why teachers have problems keeping kids' attention in school. My baby is literally a sponge and it's more of a challenge to me to keep her interested and learning than it is for her to figure it out and move on. She keeps this up and I'm gonna have to spend some of my evening times brushing up on MY math to keep up.

Labels: Duchess