Posts Tagged ‘parenting’

Since I’ve started going back to school, my grocery budget has shrunk significantly. The result? I can’t afford to feed picky eaters. We need the most bang for our buck, which means we eat lots of vegetables, cereals, and leftovers. Luckily the kids are adjusting. Here are a few tips that seem to have helped over the years. I’ll be kicking them into full gear now (more…)

I’m all about sharing the good ideas I’ve had, and if you read the site much you’ve probably noticed I share the bad ideas as well and why they were bad.

Today I had a few very bad ideas. I’ll try not to go into much detail on why they were bad this time… I’ll draw the dots and let you connect them as you’d like. But hopefully should you ever find yourself in such a situation, you’ll make better choices than I did.

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I hated math growing up. It made no sense to me. So as long as my kids were interested in reading, I thought we might as well play some math games together too, hoping they’d grow up a little brighter than their poor old ma’. So far, so good. Here are a few of the games we play.

Supplies for a Math Box ‘O Fun
- A box — I used one from a soundcard
- Foam craft sheets (I bought a pack of 48 and I have more than half left over)
- Permanent Markers
- Scissors
- A ruler for measuring and drawing grids
- Empty plastic Easter eggs (for a favorite game the kids made up)
- Cheerios, Fruit Loops, M&Ms, or any other small countable object that’s age appropriate for your kid.
- IF your kids are past the mouth-exploration stage and are somewhat patient, perler beads (the plastic ones you put on a peg board and fuse with an iron) make a great learning tool.
- Baggies (again if they’re age appropriate) or small containers to hold the games
- I’ve also bought math flash cards as the kids get a kick out of these. They get lost / ruined fast though
- Giant Dice (You can make your own with paper polyhedra here)

I had the kids help me make these games whenever I could, and took several days in between each game with several short implementations before ‘letting them’ help me come up with the next activity. They really got excited about it that way.

- Talk about more, less, and equal-to. Put down a few piles of something small and good to eat. Crackers, skittles, halved organic grapes if it suits you. Which pile does the kid want and why? Which has more, which has less? Can they make the groups equal? At first let them ‘just do it’ then ask them how they knew…. My kids’ favorite response, “Cause I took away your money!” made little sense to me, but they got big laughs out of it. They couldn’t really say why what they did made the piles equal, but they thought about it anyway and eventually with a little nudge were able to explain it.

- Cut up a few of the foam sheets to use as ‘cards’ — I wrote numerals on some, operators on others, and evaluators on others still. Keep them in one container and use them with whatever game they happen to be playing. In the more or less game, you can help them count the items in each group and assign a number to them. If you want to, you can even say, “Ah, well if you have five skittles and I have seven, let’s take away one of mine (put down 7-1) and give it to you (5+1) .. now we both have six! (=6)” If they don’t get it yet that’s okay. They’ll still get a kick out of the game and will pick up that idea sooner than you think.

- A whole foam sheet with a grid drawn on it serves well to list the numbers 1-100. They start to notice how the numbers line up, and it makes a great tool for counting items. You can make one of these grids for each of you if you’d like for your more or less game.

- Sequences: Mary loved discovering that 1+1=2, 1+2=3, 1+3=4, etc. As you can see here, I also let her be extremely creative in her dress and hair styles.

- Eventually help them discover that they can group the objects into 10s for easier counting. Once I felt like they had that idea down, I sat down with them and used another whole sheet of foam labeled it with columns for ones, tens, hundreds, and thousands. We only used the ones and tens for the most part but it helped get the idea down.

- We also made toys out of perler beads by fusing them into sticks of tens, squares of hundreds, and then taking ten hundreds to show a cube of a thousand. The kids had a blast making these into patterns for each 100 set too.

- Yet another whole foam sheet with a grid makes a nice learning tool for times tables. Put six objects across for example, and three down, and let them discover how the numbers magically add up to 18 (which happens to be the very number they put the last item on! – trust me they’ll find this amazing!)

- Estimating: My kids LOVE guessing games. One game Mary made up involved putting a few of the counting objects in an empty plastic Easter egg and having me or Ethan guess how many objects were inside it by shaking it, etc. Whoever got closest, won the loot. Or for guessing right on, she’d put out three numbers (using the aforementioned cards) and we’d have to guess which number was correct.

- Another fun guessing game: Have them pick numbers and roll dice to see whose number comes up. So they grew up in Vegas, what can I say.

- Dividing: Give them a group of items (number it with the cards) and a group of people (or stuffed animals) to share them between. Let them figure out how to divide the items up fairly.

- Cookie fractions: Trace circles on your tan foam sheets and make them look like cookies. You can half some of these (write 1/2 and .5 and 1 divided by 2 on the backs). Cut others into thirds, fourths, fifths (make a Y shape and then divide the two larger sides into two to get pretty close fifths), etc. Play game about dividing them up fairly.

- The Dollar Challenge: Visit a penny candy store (or a vendor of penny novelties if you don’t want to rot their teeth – but I’m a bad mom that way) and let them spend up to one dollar. If they go under, their loss. They can’t go over because they won’t have enough to pay for it. (I give them the six cents extra for taxes since I’m not expecting them to calculate that just yet)

Anyway, the point of all these is to keep it fun and let them be CREATIVE. It’s a bit like investigations math, but with a little one-on-one encouragement and gentle direction. And they eat it up.

Also be sure to check out the National Library of
Virtual Math Manipulatives and Cyber Chase Online for some super games they can play on their own.

I would like to consider myself feminist, but both those who call themselves Feminist and those who fight them will probably hate what I’m about to say.

I’ve seen how domineering and cruel some men can be, even in America, even in the nicest towns, justifying their actions and attitude by their gender alone. I can’t imagine what it’d be like to be a woman in a country that honors the female gender less. I’ve personally experienced gender-bias and harassment in the work place, and nearly everywhere else at one time or another. Sadly, I have seen women allow themselves to be treated this way. I have fought against it, I appreciate what has been done to fight it, and I encourage every individual and society as a whole to continue and even strengthen their efforts against this long-standing plague.

I have also noticed the popular thought that “All Men Are Idiots” where men are constantly equated with Homer Simpson — Homer himself has become less a jerk and more an idiot over the past several years to accommodate this trend. You’d be less than observant if you hadn’t noticed that media that portrays males as dolts is generally accepted, where anything that so much as hints at females having different qualities (even former Maya and Miguel theme-song) causes an outrage. I’ve been in situations where a less-qualified woman was given preference over a more-qualified man, just to “make things fair”. And has anyone met a Stay-At-Home-Dad who hasn’t been completely debased by his peers and society as a whole?

Until the vocal leaders of the feminist movement care more about fairness, freedom, quality of life, and a better world than they do about power and revenge, they will continue to spin their tires, burning rubber, causing far too much stink, and weakening their stand in the process. And as much as I abhor the term, this woman must be the reason Feminists have come to be called Feminazis. (more…)

People ask me how my toddlers learned to read. The answer is of course that I read to them and with them every day (And let them play Game Cube!). Here are some tips and a few great resources. (more…)