Living Math at Work

My son purchased a computer game after looking for several days for something he may want. I love his process he goes through as it is such a frugal one that is so natural to him! He looks and looks between computer games, Xbox live games, and even books. He looks at Walmarts, Game Stop and online at Amazon.com, and after each look takes a day or two to THINK about it and see if it is really something he wants. He does not part with his money easily, and takes his time with the purchases he does decide to make.

When he finds something, he calculates the shipping costs or if there will be a sales tax, in order to make sure he has enough money and will not have to ask us to cover the difference if he by chance goes over. He makes sure he will not go over!

On this particular purchase, he went for a computer game which he received fairly quickly through the mail after he purchased it from Amazon.com. When he went to download it, he found he needed something downloaded in order to even run the game. Well this download has tons of updates it needed to do as it has never been downloaded on his computer. This is taking a painfully long time, we are talking DAYS to download! 

Each day he has been calculating gigabytes and estimating when the update may be complete.  He looks at how much gigabytes is downloading a day and comparing that with the percentage of how much it says it is downloading.


My daughter on the other hand has been using a lot of math skills that started with our grocery shopping endeavor. She knows her food has to last 2 weeks before our next shopping trip where she again will receive $50 for a 2 week period of food, making her own food choices. At the store, she was keeping a close eye on her purchases, determining how much more she could get, how many meals she needed and if she had enough for some snacks.

As we are completing week one after shopping, she was fully aware of going through her food a little too fast. She really started going through and thinking of all the meals she had left, how long it needed to last, did she have enough dinners? Enough Lunches? Cupcakes can be considered a meal, right?  How many days can a person go without food? How hungry will I be if I run out?  Wow I should have enough! ( after talking out all her meals left, and counting in the fact mom will cook family dinners on the weekends giving her 2 free meals!)

The other thing that happened this week is that we bought a brand new push lawn mower with a grass catcher on it. The neighbor then put their riding mower out by the road for sale, a highly used riding lawn mower.

This had her asking how much we spent on ours, so she could determine which would be the better buy.  Okay, well ours was $220 and the neighbors is for sale at $250. Ours is a little cheaper but requires much more work to mow the yard. But we saw how much the riding mower was breaking down all last summer...........highly used..........all the way around she determined OURS was the better buy.

While they do not always figure out math in a manner of how it is taught in the public school system, they are still highly capable of reasoning out problems in their own way.

Living Math gives them a reason to  figure out because it is real and in the moment, it is not separated from life. When you separate math from living, it becomes some abstract affair that just does not make sense for many no matter how many times someone tries to show you. Living Math gets them excited  to figure it out because it actually applies to something they want to know right here, in the moment.

It was a beautiful thing to watch as I got to "hear" them without interfering figure it out.

Using Grocery Shopping For Learning

Grocery shopping is one of those mundane tasks we all have to do on a regular basis. There is no getting around it for the most part, it is a chore that just has to get done. How often really depends on the family, some go every couple of days, once a week, bi-monthly or once a month but certainly is something that every family does.
For the homeschooling families, a grocery trip can be a fun hands on learning trip that happens every time you go!
The child can help prepare the lists, price compare, add up the groceries as they go into the cart. There are sales to figure out percentages,figuring out unit prices, estimating how much the overflowing will costs and in many cases even figuring out sales taxes on items.
A whole range of math concepts can be covered in any one shopping trip that can be presented in a fun manner that helps build good shopping skills at the same time. It is also a great way to demonstrate those math concepts in a way that is applicable to living, that is not seperate from our daily life.
Yet there is another angle that many miss here as well that a grocery store can open a new world up to.
If you keep an eye out for a new and interesting food your family has never tried before, this can lead to discovering something new you like. When you bring it home, this opens an opportunity to look it up online to discover what it is, how it is used and what country it comes from. Sometimes this leads to an in-depth study of a new country that has not been covered yet. Sometimes it leads to learning a whole new line of ethnic cooking, preparing traditional dishes of that country.
This can hold true of items purchased that are made in a different country as well. When this is discovered it can be a fun project to have a large world wall map and colored stickers or thumb tacks. Then go through your house with the kids and discover just how many items in your house comes from a different country, marking it all on the map!
You may want to keep it all fresh by visiting a new store once in a while too or even an ethnic grocery store. By using grocery stores in this fashion, many kids will get excited over shopping days and actually will enjoy going. The occasional visit to an ethnic grocery store will almost be like going to a museum with them where they are delighted by all the new items they see and try to figure out what it is or how it may be used.
By doing all this, it takes out the mundane factor and puts in the fun and exciting. You get a chore completed at the same time the kids are learning too. What could be better than all that?
Do you simply go shopping or do you use it as a diving board for learning?

Day 12 Math Collage

Day 13 I had a lot of fun creating this Math Collage simply by printing things off I found useful or interesting to add to a large piece of poster board.

The Center Focal point of this collage is a times table grid and then the rest is decorated with optical illusions, directions for adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing fractions and a few famous mathematicians with a brief bio of them as well. Included in the Mathematicians is Albert Einstein and some of his quotes, Fibonacci, Euclid and Isaac Newton.

Both kids found thought is was pretty cool and are enjoying it even though right after I hung it up and walked down the hall I heard my daughter shouting...."HEY! MOM A PICTURE IS MOVING!" haha

My son really loved the photos and brief bio's of the Mathematicians.

Also with our Periodic Table of Elements shower curtain it is now pretty funny that anytime someone goes to use the bathroom, they come out shouting what the symbol for this and that is!

To me it is creating these simple things, these precious little learning areas that present learning in fun and interesting ways that make it all worth while.

Truth be told, how often would you look at the Periodic Table or use it if presented only in a textbook?

On the shower curtain, you are looking at it and studying it many times in the course of a day!

The Math Collage only took about an hour or so to make including time to locate things online I wanted to print and use for it. Also it was FUN, I found it a very enjoyable activity that both children loved when it was finished. It not only has an interesting look appeal but has a practical use as well as a working collage with the fraction rules and multiplication grid that can be referenced throughout the day. Not only that but they get to keep fresh in their minds who the mathematicians behind it all were, when they were born and such.

My daughter now wants me to create one that is all on the optics and optical illusions..........

Another great idea added to my getting larger everyday list of ideas! LOL

New Items for October

Mathematics of the Incas Code of the Quipu

This is the book we got today to add to our personal library which is a facinating book how the Incas kept records since nothing was in writing. It also goes into how to make a Quipu of your own from items in the house however you do need a drop spindle to make it...........so looks like I  will be ordering a drop spindle soon, this looks like it will be tons of fun! Lots of nice photos too of actual Quipu however the photos are all in black and white.

Math Journaling: A Simple Budget

Our Math Journaling is something our children love to do and we typically work in them a few times a week. It was Corin's suggestion last year that we use notebooks for Math Journals as she loves working with numbers and math concepts. Math Journaling is a wonderful exploration of living math and number practice where we can journal about our trips to the store, unit pricing, percentages, integers, gas mileage and a variety of concepts used in daily life.

The other day we worked on creating a simple budget where I gave them a monthly income of $1400 a month and wrote a few typical bills in fixed and non fixed categories. I explained the fixed and non fixed categories such as rent or mortgage and car payments being fixed where they do not change and remain the same every month. I then explained the non fixed categories such as groceries, clothing and entertainment did change and were areas you could cut back in if the budget does not add up right.

I gave them each one amount only for their income of $1400 a month however I gave them each a different amount and this number was what they had to pay in rent.  They had to work the budget for all the rest I had given them which included car payments, utilities, heating, gas for the car, car insurance, groceries, clothing and entertainment.

It was interesting to watch them give each category a value they perceived they may spend in each category, I did help show them how to add up the numbers as they went along, Shae already knew how to do this however Corin has not had much experience in adding up columns where you have to carry numbers.

At the end of this, they had to show monthly total income, monthly total expenses and then the difference to see if they had a positive or negative number. The only category I saw them both really unrealistic in was how much they would spend in gas for a car monthly, they both were REALLY short in this area listing around 20 bucks for which I laughed and explained perhaps if they had a hybrid car this would be the case!  Other than that their prices were shockingly accurate!

Shae fell short and was 77 dollars in the negative, Corin was $16 in the positive!  I told them they did not have to correct anything as I was showing them how easy it is to go over budget yet it drove Shae nuts and he tweaked his budget until his expenses matched his income! I was quite proud of him for taking that initiative! I talked with Corin on what she might do with the money she had as a surplus! It was a great experience that both kids were really excited about.

They asked if we could do a lot more work in this area so I said yes, we can do all sorts of scenarios of different rents or mortgages,  incomes, bills etc and they could even research on the computer for ideas on rent costs. Corin went racing back to the computer laughing gleefully as she shouted I am going to research RENT!!!!!!! She came back with I got some numbers and I am not telling as Shae may copy my rent costs and he can look up his own!

Who knows maybe in a few weeks they can take over the families budget and finances completely! I feel if they get nothing else from math learning how to budget and manage one's finances is the most important use for math they can get, one area I feel the public schools lack completely in where managing personal finances should be on top.

In any case the kids surprised me by their enthusiasm in this area and it was a wonderful experience to share with them and I look forward to more exploration of finances and budgeting with them!

Integers, Pen Pals, Japan and More

I love autumn as it gets into a cooler but busy harvest time of year, yesterday I harvested a lot of apples and a few other things as well. Today I put good use for some of the apples and made hubby's favorite apple pies!

Our day started with a quick discussion of children in Japan that go to public school are responsible for cleaning, they do not have janitors clean the schools but rather the children spend 30 minutes cleaning before they begin classes. We followed this up with everyone agreeing to spend 15 minutes a day all pitching in and cleaning to start our day out. It was really amazing how quickly 15 minutes can make a place look pretty darn good!

Then Shae, our 13 year old son went off to read his book "A Terrible Glory : Custer and the Little Bighorn" while Corin, our 10 year old daughter and myself wrote to our first pen pals in Idaho! We are excited to have a few pen pals from a variety of areas to write to this year! We got our pen  pals from a homeschooling pen pal group on yahoo groups at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/homeschoolpen-pals/

Both kids along with their 25 year old sister who also lives with us went through the Japanese Cookbook and picked out what recipes they want to try sometime soon.

Corin started a notebook for Copy Work she decided she wanted to do.

We learned a new word in Japanese today! This is hard for me as my hearing is not as good as it used to be! But in case you are interested our word we learned was Oyasumi nasai which means Good Night! It is really fun to try Japanese Language!

Shae took a Social Studies textbook that was actually left here and we found when we moved in and looked up the part about Japan in it and read that.

We also started our Math Journals again that the kids loved so much last year! Corin did some subtraction, addition and multiplication facts and Shae did addition to 4 digits. The fun part was we did an introduction to Integers! In the Math journal I illustrated the number lines and we discussed how Integers is the set of whole numbers and their opposites. We gave examples of how numbers could be negative such as if somebody is in debt, elevations of above and below sea level and temperatures.  I then illustrated another number line from our living Math book we got which illustrates Mortgage Balance or change in household after a divorce as negative numbers, 0 as the temperature that water freezes at , fractions being the numbers in between whole numbers, 2 being the smallest prime number and such. The kids seemed really into this and it was exciting to them to see how the Math is in our daily lives. 

The Kids also had Ramen for lunch and this is when Corin loves using her chopsticks, Shae tried once but found it quite difficult so we will get to how to use chopsticks properly at another time! While the kids ate, I used the book culture smart japan to go over food etiquette if visiting Japan.

In between things the kids would go off for breaks as I had to take our new puppy out to potty on the hour. So Shae would chose to go play a new computer game for his breaks and Corin chose to keep going outside to ride her bike.

While it may seem like a lot of this is structured it really is just spending time doing fun activities with the kids in a leisurely fashion that we are all having fun with and that is going along with our interests in the moment. It really was a fun filled day! The kids are also discussing the possibility of making an edible monopoly board.....now that would be a blast!

2 books I had ordered recently have been  although I am still waiting for the Go Green one!