Where We Are In Math

My 3 1/2 year old LOVES math. Part of me wishes she loved dollies and pretend food more, but nope. She wants to do math. I had hoped to follow a Charlotte Mason schedule in terms of when we started "schooling" (as in, not for another 2 1/2 years), but my daughter had different plans.

When I read the PNEU programmes, I was attracted to the way Mason believed math should be taught. It was gentle. It was hands-on. The sequence was logical (the PNEU programmes list Pendlebury Arithmetic: addition, subtraction, multiplication, simple division...). Little ones learned to add using beans and dominoes. Multiplication facts were learned using money (9 x 7 = 63, and one way to make 63 cents would be with 2 quarters, 1 dime, and 3 pennies, etc.). There was five minutes of drill daily.

I don't believe one must purchase a math curriculum for grades K through 3. That said, I think Mathematical Reasoning is really awesome, and I've written about that here.

My daughter has completed 150 pages of the 250-page Mathematical Reasoning Level A book. For the most part, we go in order, but if she doesn't understand a certain concept, we skip it and come back to it a few days later. Here are a couple of pages from Level A...

I'm not concerned with handwriting right now. She can learn to write Year 1 when she has more fine motor strength. But right now, she's capable of counting items in a set (one-to-one correspondence), and matching sets of items to numerals.

This page was fun because we used real pennies to "buy" candy by placing one penny over each piece of candy. This activity could also be done with real candy (like M&Ms or Smarties) and pennies!