Fraction Equivalences Chart - FREE Download

If you've been reading our weekly wrap-up posts, you will see that we are working on Fraction Equivalences.

While I hand-wrote our Fraction Problem tickets, I created a Fraction Chart for self-checking.  The idea is from here.  Similar to hers I've created this with the Montessori Bead Colors.  You can download it here.

As it is with all over the blog world, these downloads are for your personal use only and not for distribution or sale.  If you choose to share anything you've seen in this blog, please link back to here.  Thank you for your understanding!

Addition Story Problems

As I was going through Karen Tyler's Math Albums to see what I have missed, I came across the Story problem presentations.  So I quickly printed out the three Story Problem Sheets that she had provided with the course.  D worked with the first one and loved it.  I showed her how to record it in her Math journal.  After finishing the Addition Strip Board, it was good practice for D to work on addition facts as well as to see how it might fit into the real world.

We are onto the Subtraction Strip Board

We started to work on the Subtraction Memorization sequence after finishing up the last of the Addition Charts.  D preferred to write and fill up the last Addition Chart.  I did cross question a few sums to make sure D was just not following the pattern to fill up the chart and she did perfectly fine!  

So I presented the Subtraction Strip board to her.

She caught on and started to fill in the booklet on Subtraction tables.  She figured out that since she knows the sums, she did not have to use the board!

There were a few that she was not sure, so she only used the blue strips to cover the squares that she did not need to figure out the answers!  So much for buying this set hoping it would get a lot of use!  So now I am off to printing the Subtraction Equation slips for her to use.  I don't think we are going to stay on this for long, so I might have to get her  to work on skip counting, so we can start working on the Multiplication Board simultaneously.

Addition Snake Game Extension

Addition Snake Game has been a favorite here for some time.  D loves writing her own long addition problems and solving those with the snake game.  The other day while I was looking through the Karen Tyler's albums I found this cool extension.  She even provides the printable needed for this activity!

This was a big hit and D worked through all of the cards in one sitting!

Making Fraction Books

We are into making a book out of everything these days.  D is in her sensitive period for language and writing and we are taking full advantage of it!  The Fraction Work is not chosen often, so one day I greeted D in the school room with the proposal to make fraction booklets and it was well received!

I don't have a picture of our tray but it basically had 4 cut outs each of three shapes, a circle, square and a rectangle.  I started with story of how these were to be shared with only D and M.  Then two more guests arrive, so we had to divide and share it even further. The 4 more neighbors arrive and we had to share it even further.  So basically D had to cut out, paste and write the fraction for each division.

I introduced D to decorating her booklet with borders of her choice and she loved personalizing this!  In Montessori Elementary kids are often asked to personalize their work this way, so it was a good preparation for next year!

Of course M had to create and decorate her own booklet!

Fraction Nomenclature

When we were working with fractions way back in June I had hand-written our nomenclature cards.  The served their purpose but looked ugly!  As part of the re-organization that I am doing for our school room, I quickly put together these nomenclature cards.  It also has a simple definition for each part.  I store these in a simple envelope I made by folding construction paper.  I wanted to laminate both the cards and the cover, but we are out of the laminating sheets right now!

If you are interested you can download this pdf by clicking here or by visiting the download tab above.

These downloads are for your personal use only and not for distribution or sale.  If you choose to share anything you've seen in this blog, please link back to here.  Thank you for your understanding!

Geometry: Quadrilaterals

We did not do much Montessori work in the last couple of weeks.  The reason is that D is having Swimming Lessons and it is right after lunch.  It takes around 20 mins for us to get there and we need to eat an hour before the session.  This reduces our morning work time considerably, hence we've skipped the school room altogether.  We are working on some Language and Math workbooks, instead.  I picked these up at various Garage sales and some were given to us by a friend.  D loves working on these and I am glad that we get some school work done!  She will do 5-6 pages in each book at one sitting!  Math is the slowest though.

The rest of the afternoon and evening is spent playing outside, having fun in the sun!

After a long time D, went inside the school room today!  Seems like she missed the Montessori works!  She randomly picked the Quadrilateral tray from the Geometric Cabinet.  This was part of the order from Caliber Montessori that I picked up during their clearance sale.

She also worked on the 3-part cards.  I got these from Kid Advance.  They are awesome quality and saved me a lot of time from printing and laminating.

Then she proceeded to create a booklet of the various shapes on my suggestion, but she was so focussed on getting this booklet completed!  We used metal inset paper for the inside and construction paper for the cover.

She also then proceeded to work on the Constructive Triangle, box 1 to create the various quadrilaterals.

This is an older photo of D working on Box 1, I just did not take one today!

Since there is some new interest in the Geometry area, I want to create a Geometry station with various activities in Geometry.  I've a list of materials the I want to make using ideas that I've gathered from the various blogs and my plan is to start and finish everything by this summer, right on time for the next school year! 

Fractions

We started formal work with the Montessori Fraction Materials last week! (Another new buy!).  I had introduced fractions before using home-made foam circles, but then again, I had only made 1, 1/2, 1/3 and a 1/4th.  The Montessori Fractions go all the way up to 1/10th.  Another great thing is that they are accurate, so it is easier for the children to discover equivalencies, which D has already started!

So, here is the first presentation.  Naming the different Fractions.  You need black strips for the fraction bar and numbers 1 through 10 for the denominators.

Here is the next presentation where you match pre-written fractions like 1, 1/2, 1/3, etc. to the corresponding fraction circles.

Once the child understand the concepts, it is time to build fractions! I created this little tub with commands to build the fractions.  The commands basically contain all possible commands to build the various fractions.

In the above picture you can see a 2/6, 3/7 and 3/4 built.

I also made these Nomenclature cards to quickly explain the various parts of the fractions.

I also created these definitions to go along with the above set.

As you can see from the above, all my labels, commands and nomenclature cards are hand made.  I quickly wrote them on Index cards and cut to size.  Nothing fancy!  Once I am sure that D grasps the above concepts I will move on to introducing fractions of groups.

Montessori Monday - Recap of last week

We weren't really motivated to get into the schoolroom last week after the long weekend, so we began with a nature hike.  Things picked up slowly from there.  We got to discuss plants and read some botany booklets and did some of the botany puzzles.  

On subsequent days we did get into the school room and began our routine works.

In Math, we worked quite a bit on the Stamp Game.  We covered Addition and Multiplication both static and dynamic.  D loves it when she creates her own problems for these!

Stamp game

 We are very fortunate to have a friendly homeschooling neighbor!  They were cleaning out and gave us these addition and subtraction worksheets.  You can clip on a blank sheet and work on solving the problems on the front.  Once you are finished, you just flip the worksheet and check your answers.

Front, where you solve problems

Back, where you verify answers

D likes these and I like these because D is ready for the Memorization work using the Strip Board and I am still waiting for it to arrive!  I ordered it two weeks back and hopefully we should get it this week.

In Language D worked on writing a few nouns each in the Person, Place, Thing and Idea category.  She loves writing right now and I am capitalizing on that!

D worked on the reading folders one day and started to write the "ay" sound words after reading the little booklet.  She gave up after writing this page!

We are also slowly working on Compound words.  I am using these Compound Word Puzzles that I purchased from Oriental Trading.  They are not great quality, but they get the job done.

I put out 5 at a time.  Once D assembles the words she copies it down in her Language Book.

We also worked on a few pages of Copy Work.

Of course M needs to copy whatever D does!

I found M one day working on the mystery bag while I was presenting some work to D.  She basically uses this like a puzzle, but she is pretty good at it!  After she is done, she picks it up and says - "Bye! See you tomorrow!" and walks away with the bag!

We did read a ton of books and also spent a lot of time outside enjoying the good weather.  Hop on over to read other Montessori Monday posts!

Problem with the Short Bead Chain arrangement

As many of you know purchasing the Bead Chains is one of the most expensive affairs in your Montessori homeschool.  So I bought only the Short bead chains and squares (awesome price at Caliber Montessori), no box, no cabinet or wall stand.  I did not get the long bead chains for two reasons.  One being that I was not sure whether D would have the patience to work through those and the other being the price.  I am still not sure whether I should buy the long chains, but that is another story for later.  Coming back to the problem of the Short bead chains, I should have either bought the box or the wall stand.  Here is why.  I had originally set it up in a tray like this.

The chains in the bowl and squares stacked next to it and the small home made "notch paper" that can be used for counting.

The bead chain arrows in their individual containers.

Everything looked great till I observed D using this setup for a couple of days.

Yes! That is my little one sitting on a Pink Cube!

As you can see, since it was all in one tray, D assumed that she had to work on all the chains and do all the arrows in one sitting.  This was exhausting for her and she is done with math for the day as soon as she is done with this work.  Another problem is that there is no way to untangle and get only one bead chain, the chain she decides to work on that particular day from the bowl, without spilling the contents.

D is skip counting aloud after she completed the whole layout for every chain.

I don't think she would be able to memorize skip counting using different numbers if she works this way, she should be working on one chain for a few days till she masters it.  So, I finally decided to get the wall stand ($10 on most online stores).  Hopefully this should alleviate the problems I mentioned above.

Coming back to the issue of whether to get the long bead chains, for now, since my monthly budget will not allow it, I am going to see if I can have D work with the skip counting cards that we got as part of the RightStart Mathematics Level B.  Once I have the wall stand set up for the short bead chains, D can pick one number and get the corresponding chain, arrows and Skip Counting envelope and work with it.  The only issue is that she might not understand the cubes and how those relate to the long chains.

Each set has its own envelope.

How does this work in your homeschool?

More Odd/Even and Skip Coutning

We had a rain free week last week, so we spent a lot of time playing outside and enjoying it! We had only a couple of days of school last week.  One of those days I found D trying to use the bead bars to list the Odd and Even Numbers until 20.  It is amazing how versatile and open ended all of the Montessori Materials are.  Isn't spontaneous learning wonderful, especially when the adult plays no part in the initiation of the experience!

This led to a discussion of skip counting by 2's and D wanted to do all of her chains.  We only have the short bead chains.

She enjoyed this work so much and she wanted to complete all the 9 chains.  She even joined us late for dinner, since she wanted to complete this work!  The bead material is so expensive, but should I bite the bullet and get the long bead chains? Decisions... decisions...

Re-cap of our work week - May 7-14

How do you come up with really interesting titles for your posts ? I am running out of ideas!

Anyway, here are some glimpses of our Math work last week.  One new thing we started last week is for D to record what she works with, where applicable, in her Math notebook.  I got this notebook from India, this is kind of the standard Math notebook that elementary kids back home use.  It is nice, since you can write one digit in each square.  You can also use graph sheets with appropriate sized squares for this purpose.

As you can see we've been working on skip counting by 2s or figuring out the even numbers up to 30.  We used the RightStart Abacus initially to do this, since the bead chains only go up to 4 and 8.  Then we used this hundred chart to count and stamp by 2's, 5's and 10's using our dot markers.

After D was done counting by 2's, 5's and 10's she wanted to cross out all the odd numbers!

Other than this we also reviewed the types of Quadrilaterals and Triangles.  We also reviewed the value for different coins and played with coins to find out how to use different denominations to arrive at the same sum.

In Language, we've been working our way through Grammar and D sorted the different types of nouns.

I just wrote these out using silver marker on black construction paper

D drew and labelled "things" she found in our kitchen as part of finding out how things are named using nouns.

One day we did this while playing, basically D marking using the Montessori symbols the articles, adjectives and nouns.  Now I can't seem to find this one paper!

Since D hates handwriting worksheets, we are practicing good writing and punctuation by doing copy work.  D would never like or be interested in copying random stuff, so most of our writing relates to the work we've been doing that week.  D does 3-4 pages per week and I can already see a tremendous improvement in her handwriting!  Here is a sample.

D has been reading about butterflies, frogs and bean plants from various books that I borrowed from our local library.

We just started back on All About Spelling.  With the weather being so nice we haven't had much time to continue the lessons.  My goal is to do at least 2 lessons per week.  We are going to start from the beginning of Level 2 since we took a break earlier this year.

We tried some wet chalk drawing on black construction paper and D enjoyed it.

We focussed on Mexico last week. I basically pulled out all our Mexico stuff from the North America Box and let D explore and ask questions.

D is slowly by surely entering into the second plane of development!  Part of this is exciting, but part of this is also that she will not choose works that challenge her.  She would be happily peeling off and dressing up the different paper dolls she has in her continent boxes all through school time, without ever touching any other single work.  Now with a 2 year old distracting me, it is very easy for D to slip off into only doing whatever she wants and not any work that provides the next level of development.  So we tried something new this week.  I created a task list/work contract that D is responsible for finishing.  Nothing fancy, I just wrote whatever were the next logical step to whatever she was already doing.  Of course there are things on there that I need to help present or give directions, but the onus is on her to get her list checked off.

So far this has been working ok.  D likes the idea of checking off, so she knows exactly what she needs to do instead of just going into the school room and trying to choose what she wants.  Right now, she still needs to be reminded that there is a task list that she is responsible for, but we working towards it!