Thursday, October 4, 2012

Balance Scale {Math}



A couple weeks ago when I redid some of the links on the site, I realized how little I have posted on our math activities. It's not necessarily because we haven't done any... it just doesn't seem to have that much excitement. But excitement or not, I figured someone somewhere may find some encouragement or inspiration from our Math work!

I noticed that Bear was having a really hard time with the scale game on Starfall. He just seemed super frustrated. I figured that being able to do it himself (rather than on the screen) would help. I found this inexpensive scale from Learning Resource and bought these weights to go with it.



He was so crazy excited when they came in the mail! He spent the first couple days weighing things around the house. We talked about forms of measurement and how his weights were in grams not pounds and what that meant. 

The weights we have are in increments of 1g-25g. It makes it a little tricky to add up if you haven't done much addition work as opposed to using a 1:1 method of measuring. They sell little counters you can use something from around the house (rocks, pennies, legos) It ended up being excellent addition work for Bear but if it's frustrating by all means switch to something easier! Being able to add 10 + 5+ 3 is a different concept than balance! 

For his activity, I wrote down three items to weigh and had him weigh them and write down the weights. I helped with the addition if it was something tricky but for the most part the items weighed less than 10g. We weighed objects from our Stone Soup story tray we made last year from Rhythm of the Home.  It tied in really well with our fall activities! 


We seem to be entering a sensitive period for math so I am sure that we'll have many more to share in the coming weeks! 
Happy Schooling-
Lauren

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