Math HELP!

[PamE]

Okay, confession time. Math has never been and probably never will be my forte. :\ I harbor this fear that I will pass my math skills on to my children as is. Thankfully I have a cd curriculum for our oldest, 4th grade dd. We have the youngest two in Kindergarten together. I'm needing some ideas on how to get them started in math. Ds needs a lot of hands on stuff and little worksheet/busy work type things. I'm looking for sturdy, inexpensive manipulatives that we can use for counting, grouping, charting, etc. Dd loved M & M math but I have visions of colored fingers and disappearing manipulatives! :D

I'd love any suggestions, links, anything! TIA

[AnnW]

What about beans, buttons, cubes, poker chips..things like that.

[Lynda/WA]

DS's Kindergarten used large painted beans. The teacher wasn't very happy with them because they kept splitting. Probably wouldn't be a problem with you. In their case they chose beans over toys because they didn't want them walking home. That won't be an issue with you. I'd vary. Maybe candy for a little while. Then let them eat it. How about legos? Legos have the advantage of being colored so you can do the grouping. Any small plastic toy would work. A bag of plastic dinosaurs?

A couple of things that DS did in Kindergarten- They had papers made up with an oversided addition problem. About 1 problem per half page. Half pages seperated. Lets say the problem was 5 + 2 = . They would count out 5 beans and put it over the number 5. Then count out 2 and put it over the two. then they would slide all of the beans to the other side of the = and come up with the answer. Really cute.

We worked alot with a tens grid. I made up two of them on the computer. The first went 0-9 for line one, then 10-19 for line two, 20-29 etc. I used that to help explain how there is a pattern with numbers. And I started talking about sets. I showed him how the tens position also had a pattern just like counting.

The second grid was the more traditional 1-10,11-20,21-30. That came into play with taling about sets of 10 and such. I made it big enough to put pennies on like you would a bingo sheet. We'd talk about how 25 was really two complete covered rows and an additional 5.

Also practice counting by 2s, 5s, and 10s. 2s they'd practice up to 20 and the others up to 100. Counting by 5s especially came in handy when learning time and money.

She used many things with the calender. Each day she would have a child put up a different colored picture for the date. For example in February each cut-out was a heart. Day one would be red, day 2 white, day 3 red, day 4 white. Once they saw the pattern and could anticipate what the next color was she pointed out that you could count by twos. Then she pointed out that this was even and odd.

A couple of games that we did at home. I made cards with addition, subtraction problems on them. Then we used those in place of the colored cards in Candy Land. We also used a set of similar cards to play the game war. Anything to do flashcard style practice without the boredom of flashcards!