Watercraft of the World Math Block, Week 1 - Addition

For this math block, I will be taking some lesson plan ideas from two different places.  The core of the block comes from Marsha Johnson's Waldorf Home Educators Yahoo Group, and some additional ideas come From A Journey Through Waldorf Math by Melisa Nielson. The focus of this block will be review of the four processes, skip counting/times tables for 2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10 and 11.  Grant can skip count really well by the 2's, 5's and 10's.  He does pretty good with the 3's.  We will slowly be adding in the rest over the course of this four week block. During the block, we will also begin working on math in columns, and talk about the concept of greater than and less than.

We started Monday with some outdoor playtime.  It was sunny, but cold, after thunderstorms with tornado warnings rolled through the night before.

Once we got into the school room, we did our circle time and we added in more movement math review. We did a step,step,jump! while we counted on every movement. Next, we only said the number out loud that landed on the jump.  I this case, it was counting by 3's.  We will also be setting the times tables/skip counting to music.  We started with counting by 2's to the tune of "Happy Birthday".  I also introduced counting by 11's with a bean bag toss.

After that math review, we did our penny whistle lesson and then I told Grant the story which would start us on our main lesson. This week we will focus on addition.  The basics for this story comes from Marsha Johnson.  I just filled in some more details.  It was a story about two boys living in ancient Egypt who are bored and decide they are going to take their father's Lateen Ship, which he uses for transportation and trading, and sail it up the Nile River.  The journey starts out as fun, but the boys head closer to the sea and towards some angry hippo's.  They can no longer control the boat, and their cries for help are heard by another sailor on his ship who rescues them and pulls them and their ship back home.

 In the story, I described how Lateen ships were built and used for trading.  I told about the commonly traded items of dried dates, nuts, small bottles, perfumes and oils.  Once I was done with the story, I put out some date pieces to use for counting.  First, I had Grant count them.  Then he counted them out by 2's.  After that I divided them into piles and had Grant add the two piles together.  We put them all back in one pile and Grant counted them by 5's (the number kept changing as little hands kept reaching in a taking date pieces out one by one).  After that he divided the pieces into 3 equal piles. One for himself, one for Johanna, and one for Julia. They enjoyed this little tasty treat!

After that I wrote the numbers 1-9 on the board, and had Grant come up and copy them.

Then we drew pictures of Lateen boats in our lesson books:

Mom's Drawing

Grant's Drawing

On Tuesday, we did our movement math review while on our morning walk.  Grant and I sang some of the times tables.  We sang the 2's to the tune of "Happy Birthday", the 3's to the tune of "Clementine", and the 5's to the tune of "Old MacDonald". We also did the step/step/jump pattern of the 3's times table.  Once inside, we looked at the repeating pattern in numbers.  We started simple, and looked at the pattern when counting by 1:

We also looked at the repeating pattern when counting by 2's and then by 4's.

 Writing all these numbers out was good practice for Grant.

After that we did our penny whistle lesson, and then I read the kids this book:

We have been seeing some geese lately on our pond, so this was perfect timing.

I also told  Grant a little bit more about the two boys from the story on Monday.  After they apologized to their Father for taking the boat out and promised never to do it again, they wanted to learn more about the hippos they saw, and so did we! We looked at pictures of hippos in this book (Thanks Uncle Andy!):

We also talked about them a little bit, and then we did some mental math problems using hippos.  If we have one hippo, how many legs does it have?  How many tusks?  What if we have two hippos?  What if they have a little baby?  What if a hippo with four legs meets a trader with two legs?  How many legs? What if another man comes over?  How many legs?

We also talked more about the items they would be trading, such as grains and nuts.  Then we used barley and nuts for some counting exercises.  I put a pile of barley in front of Grant and had him divide it into piles of five, then count by fives to tell me how much there was.

Once he was done with this, we used the border edge of his drawing to write out the 5's table:

Then I told him how the boy's father brought back some nuts from one of his trips and gave the two boys ten nuts to divide up.  The older boy had the pile of nuts and decided to keep 9 for himself and give 1 to the younger boy.  "No,no said the boy.  That's not fair."  So, the older boy split it 8-2, then 7-3 and so on until 5-5.  But then, the younger boy says, "No, six for me and 4 for you", etc until they are back to 9-1, and the father steps in to help them divide them up evenly.  This was a review of "whole-to-parts" and we were able to see all the different ways to get the number 10.

As we were dividing up the piles, Grant was writing the equations in his lesson book. I also introduced adding in up and down columns.  I used a block crayon to color a blue stripe and a green stripe.  Then I explained the stripes as the Nile River and it's shore, and told Grant how the answers will flow down to below like fish. Using the stripes, I also introduced place value, and explained how each number can only have it's own space, and there cannot be two numbers in one place.

On Wednesday, we once again did some math review outside with our times tables songs and stepping/jumping game.  This time we added on the 4's table to the tune of "Around the Mulberry Bush." 

When we got inside we made some times tables circles. 

We made the tables for the 2's, 3's 4's 5's and 10's.  I will laminate these, punch a hole in them and put them on a ring, so Grant will have them as a reference until he has them all memorized.

While Grant was having a snack we did some more mental math problems.  What if we had 10 hippos?  How many legs?  What if half of them leave?  What if three lateen boats were sailing up river and met six sailing down river?  How many?  What if two more joined them?

After that we did some more adding in columns.  We reviewed the 1's and 10's place values, and I introduced the 100's place.  I also introduced the concept of carrying, and Grant practiced some equations.



After that Grant did some reading, and everyone wanted to get in on the fun.

I like how he is sitting on the table even though he knows he's not supposed to, uh-hum.

Little Julia was kind enough to help me put all the books away.

In addition to the math review we've been doing this week, on Thursday, we also walked out counting by 2's forward, then walked backward counting by 2's backward.  This was a little tricky at first for Grant.

We also did our penny whistle lesson, and finished making our times tables circles for the 6's, 7's, 8's, 9's and 11's.

After that I had Grant copy some mental math problems from the board into his lesson book, just to get some handwriting practice in this week. I also tried to include as many different numbers as I could so Grant got some practice spelling out the numbers.  I also added in the element of telling time for review.  Grant had to answer the questions, and also show me, on the clock we made, the times that were mentioned in the questions.

Once he had these copied in his book we worked on some more adding in columns.

After he did the copy work, he asked if we had more to do.  I told him yes, and he said it better be something fun.  I told him we were going to do some more adding in columns and he got all excited and said, "Yay!  That's fun!" 

We also modeled some hippos out of beeswax, but Grant didn't think that was much fun.  He got frustrated quickly, and didn't want to spend the time to make it look better. 

On Friday, the kids spent a lot of time playing outside enjoying the warm weather.  I also made some chocolate pudding using, would you believe, dates and avocados (along with a few other things). I guess you will have to trust me when I say it was really good!

That wrapped up our week on addition.  Next week we will move onto the Chinese Junk and subtraction review.