Showing posts with label manipulatives. Show all posts
Showing posts with label manipulatives. Show all posts

Saturday, August 16, 2014

Small Space Homeschooling Part 2: Books and Manipulatives.


Living in a small space means getting a little creative with how we organize our homeschool materials.  We're currently living in an apartment and no longer have an extra room to use as our school room.  That means revamping my organization for all our homeschool goodies.

   In Small Space Homeschooling Part 1 I shared our portable workbox with you.  That's where I place all of our materials needed for the coming school week.  It has helped make our days so much more enjoyable. 

Books:

Most of our books are on these bookshelves in my son's room.  For the most part, Bubba keeps from messing it up too bad. 

Up on the top we have a basket of arts and crafts kits.  This includes their art kits, weaving sets, and embroidery stuff.  I believe we also may have a couple of fashion design workbooks in there that belong to Squirrely Girl.

The top shelf houses books that specifically deal with our school year.  It includes current workbooks, textbooks, and many of the science and living history books we'll be using for the year along with My Father's World Learning God's Story  Our Unifix cubes and pattern blocks are up there as well, as well as Squirrely Girls  leveled readers.

The next two shelves house a good part of our other books that we use during reading time.

The second to bottom shelf is where we keep a bunch of our manipulatives.  They're numbered because we used to used these as our busy boxes and I just haven't relabled them yet.

  • Box 1:  Holds some of our Language Arts work.  I have laminated various work heets that I sometimes add to the girls Daily folders.  We have some rhyme strips, punctuation strips, and antonym/synonym strips in here.
  • Box 2:  Holds our geometry stuff.  We have some flashcards, drawing sheets, matching cards, and another set of pattern blocks.
  • Box 3: Holds some of our Math stuff.  We have beans, marbles, number cards, ordering cards, craft sticks, shape buttons, a calculator, a set of 10 ten frames, number magnets, addition and subtraction flashcards, number bond bracelets, and more. 
  • Box 4:  Holds pipe cleaners, string, and beads along with some pom poms.
  • Box 5: Holds some of our alphabet work.  We have magnetic letters, alphabet puzzle cards, alphabet puzzle, upper and lower case matching cards, and some flashcards. 

The bottom shelf has some personal dry erase boards and a basket of coloring books, which I rotate out from our collection that we've accumulated.
 
Other Stuff:

This is our game closet.  I cleared off two of the shelves to accommodate all of our homeschooling stuff.


Here's the binder where I keep worksheets divided by week.
This makes pulling out our stuff for the week so much faster.

This is where we keep the kids nature journals, their reference binders, and a couple of my binders with reference sheets and weekly work in them.


The Clear 3 drawer Sterilite organizer holds their crayons, scissors, pencils, and markers as well as some drawing paper.  One drawer also has some laminated handwriting worksheets, as well as some activities that I'd like to eventually get to.






Do you have any tips on how to organize your school stuff in a small space?  Let me know how in the comments!

Wednesday, August 13, 2014

1st Grade Math

We're only a few weeks into MFW 1st Grade, but I thought I'd share with you how we are doing math.  Squirrely Girl (6) has been working on her addition and subtraction facts since Spring, but it's been more laid back.  Bear (4) is still working on her numbers, but is able to do some simple addition and subtraction with the help of manipulatives.

I've seen quite a few people saying that they didn't care for the layout of the Math for first grade.  Personally, I don't mind the way the topics are arranged, but we are definitely supplementing because right now much of the work is just too easy for our little Squirrely Girl. 

We've been following along with the MFW lesson plans in The Complete Book of Math.  So far, the lessons are just a review and a little too easy for our 6 year old, but our 4 year old is keeping up well.  For now, this is working for us, but I'm evaluating mid-year if we need to buy something more challenging.

My kids love to do worksheets, so much so that sometimes they even request them on our off days!  So, we've been supplementing their math with worksheets we find online, as well as the Brain Quest 1st grade workbook as well as their Kindergarten workbook for Bear. 

 


In addition to the worksheets, we also incorporate a lot of hands on math practice.  We use our addition and subtraction flashcards along with a manipulative.




Some of our manipulatives include:
  • Unifix cubes
  • Pattern blocks
  • Marbles
  • Beans
  • Coins
  • Shape buttons
  • Colored craft sticks
  • Number bond bracelets
  • Legos
  • Dice
  • Dominos



I also found this great little Count and Balance Scale at a yardsale!  It has numbers that can be hung on either side.  The girls love using this and seeing how many ways they can make it balance out!


I love yard sales!  We have found some awesome things to add to our homeschool from them!

 

I also made a set of 10 "Ten Frames" for the kids to use!  I did these by hand and laminated them, and as you can see I feel the need to decorate like crazy! I just think they're more fun that way!  The kids like choosing theirs for the day. 

We've used these for counting and adding with manipulatives, but we've also used them alone to talk about tens.  Squirrely Girl has gotten pretty good with knowing how many ten frames she needs to make her numbers, and then she'll grab single manipulatives for the ones.  It's really helped her to visualize place value. 




What do you use for First Grade math?  What manipulatives do you use?