Just a Quick Update

I have been quite busy recently and I haven’t updated my blog in a long time, so I decided to write a quick post just to show I am still around!

First of all, thank you Reei for becoming my follower! I am very excited and flattered! Reei has her own blog which is a great read and very insightful.

I am currently doing some research on the different ways to help kids’ speech and language development and will be writing about my findings soon. This is LM’s biggest challenge at the moment and as we have been generally let down by the National Health System, who have introduced further cuts to the funding and have cancelled all individual S&L sessions, I will need to do a lot of DIY work here.

For now, I just wanted to thank all those who visited and commented on my blog.

LM’s Mum

Egg Carton Math

I would like to vary LM’s experience with numbers and, inspired by Numicon, I came up with this idea of recycling egg cartons:

As you can tell, omelettes have featured extensively on our family menu recently!

Well, although these are far from the nice and sleek Numicon shapes, and they certainly do have limitations, I think they can do the job of providing a mental reference for numbers. There are a few activities I am going to do with LM and, if these go well, I may splash on the real thing.

My current list of activities, starting with the most basic, are:

1.   Sequencing the “shapes” from 1 to 10 and backwards;

2.   Matching number symbols to “shapes”;

3.   Odd/even numbers;

4.   Larger/smaller numbers;

5.   Understanding two-digit numbers (place value);

6.   Exploring number bonds for different numbers, e.g. 10 can be made of 1 and 9, 2 and 8, etc;

7.   Basic arithmetic, e.g. adding one more to each “shape” to get the consecutive one, or doing subtractions by covering some of the cups.

8.   Using the "shapes" as frames and practicing counting and arythmetic with small objects (placing them in the individual cups).

I suppose, I could stretch these further. If you have more ideas, let me know!

LM's Mum