We have found a fun, new math resource.
I first heard about Times Tables the Fun Way by Judy Liautaud when I visited the Montessori school in Lakeside. Math facts for 3's 4's, 5's, 6's, 7's and 8's have a fun story to help the children remember it. I looked it up and Judy Liautaud has also written a similar book for the addition facts. My budget would only fit in one, so I decided to start with Addition the Fun Way.
My boys are really picking up on these. Each number is a cartoon character for example, 3 is a bee: the 3 bee. 6 is always sick. Some are silly, but others are pretty good. Either way, it seems to work.
Memorizing math facts are important, yet I also do not like the idea of memorizing by rote without understanding the concepts behind it. So we have also pulled out the dominoes. We have a set of double nine dominoes which are perfect for generating addition (or multiplication) problems from 0-9. So we pick out a domino at random, say the problem, maybe write it on the white board and then talk about the story. Then they count the dots to make sure we are right. It is fun to see.
Another fun game we have started playing is Addition War very similar to traditional War. We use a stack on number cards with each player having half of the cards. To play, the players each pull off the top two cards from the deck and lay them on the table. The two cards are added together. The player whose card added up higher get all the cards on the table. Much funner than timed sheets.
