We've Moved!

If you have noticed there haven't been any posts lately, there is a very good, although not-so-fun reason for that!  I have been writing posts for this blog using an iPhone app, but the app has decided to fail, and the authors/support team have decided to bail.  *sigh*  I've tried a variety of methods to fix my problem, but recently came to the conclusion that my only option was to leave Blogger for the green(er) pastures of Wordpress.

So, please come see us at our new location: Discoveringourway.com

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There will be a lot of new content soon (and it will include math!) so we don't want anyone to miss out on the fun!  Hope to see you all there.

Week 25 - Math is Great!

I often start our weekly school time by asking DJ to "choose something to do." This week his answer to my question was the 45 Layout - again. DJ first did this work back in June 2015. This is a BIG work for a little person. It involves laying out all of the 1 to 9000 number cards along with corresponding Golden Beads. Sometimes called the "Bird's Eye View," the purpose is to give a very tangible experience of the size difference between "1" shown by one little bead and "9000" shown by a tower of nine thousand cubes.

Week 24: Stamp Game

After a year of working with the Golden Bead materials, I introduced DJ to the Stamp Game this week. This material will be used in a very similar way to the Golden Beads to do addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. However, instead of have a tiny unit bead and a large thousand cube, each category will be represented with a small square with the category written on it. This is the beginning of the "passage to abstraction" - although DJ will still be working with concrete materials, they are more abstract in that there are not size differences.

Week 23 - Triangles, Numbers & Iguanas

I finally got around to presenting Box 5 of the Constructive Triangles to DJ this week. I have to say these boxes are probably my favorite of all the sensorial materials. They have been so much fun. Because it had been awhile since we had worked with them, we started back at the beginning with a review.


Rectangle Box A - this box shows how triangles can make a square, rectangle, rhombus, 3 different parallelograms and a trapezoid. Since we were reviewing, I made a point to name the triangles in a way I haven't before - right-angle isosceles, right-angle scalene, equilateral, etc.

Continent Boxes - Asia

I am *finally* getting around to showing you inside our Asia Continent Box, even though it's been a good six months that DJ has been exploring it. I took pictures awhile ago but just never typed up the post. So here it is.

Week 22 - Happy Valentine's Day!

We're still slowly getting back into our school rhythm so we didn't do a lot and haven't added anything new recently.

Weeks 17-21: Unschooling

And we're back! I know, it's been a month since I last wrote a blog post and you've all been anxious to know where we've been. I titled the last blog post "All the time in the world" in reference to my recent discovery that I need to teach more patiently, allowing more time for my son to go at his own pace and for me to not feel desperate when he isn't interested in moving forward. Combine that with a very hectic work schedule for me last month and a family vacation to Ohio in the middle of it and we've not done much schooling lately. In fact, I haven't done any formal schooling and during that time I've seen what it might be like to follow an "Unschooling" philosophy. For those of you not in the know, Unschooling is (essentially) a homeschool method where the parent let's their child discover things on their own by making sure they have the resources necessary to do so. And that is basically what DJ has been doing the last few weeks.

Week 16: All the time in the world

After taking Christmas week off, DJ surprised me by voluntarily selecting the Movable Alphabet to work with. He still didn't want to write words. He tells me that he "has too many sounds in his head to think of a word". Instead he decided to match the MA letters to the double sandpaper letters, which was a great opportunity for me to see how many of those sounds he recognizes and he knows most of them.