3 Month Kindergarten Math Update

Kindergarten homeschool math has been going AWESOME! I did an original post (here) about how we were learning all sorts of number activities, math half sheets, and other fun things in the beginning! Those worked awesome for a while but I’m always looking for fun new ways to shake things up and new things to teach! As we master the old topics and move onto harder ones teaching stiles sometimes need to change/grow! This also helps to hold a child’s attention.

I have found that capturing attention is one of the HARDEST parts of homeschooling. At least for us, the video at a desk rarely works. The “at a desk” rarely works. Let’s dive into some of our NEW activities for math now that we are almost 3 months in.

Abeka Math Curriculum:

We have been working ahead on the math workbook portion. I like how colorful the workbook is and how it shows as a guidelines what kindergartners should know for the year in math! For those new to homeschool I would recommend the workbook curriculum because you can keep track of what kids should know. We learned early on to skip the videos for the math portion because they didn’t work for us. Since my daughter was already ahead of the math in the beginning it started out too slow for her. On top of that, it is an extra 25 minutes or so for her to sit still. She didn’t retain much from it. And the numbers “story” association with the family unite is great I guess for the traditional family, but a little weird for us. I know I’ve mentioned it before, but numbers don’t have babies…etc. But the workbook curriculum is great! Here is a glimpse of how colorful, fun, and all encompassing with the math problems, clocks, coins, etc that the pages have:

Coin Counting:

For us, one row of coins a day or just a few a week is not enough to master the topic. But I like to make it FUN. So, I added a little store game to our curriculum. We’ve been doing this activity a few different ways over the past weeks BUT this is our all time favorite. I gather some fun items from around the house, just random stuff. I have a stack of little price tags I cut out of card stock with random cent amounts on them. I’ll pick 4-5 items and lay out random price tickets in front of them.

I have a jar of pre-covid era coins (so they are clean) that we use and I dump them out on the floor so that my daughter can select them and “buy” the items! It makes for a fun little game. It is a great hands on way to practice coin counting!

Peekaboo Addition Cards!

These are fun! They don’t sell the set we have anymore this is an OLD set but I’ll try to link few similar ones below! My daughter loves card games, and this peekaboo math card game is so easy and fun. Simply do the math problems, guess the answers, and check them in the flap! Practicing these over and over a lot makes the kiddos have a really good grasp of the problems and. Very fast response with them!

PBS Kids Simple Beginner Fractions:

This is a really easy, very basic introduction to beginner fractions. By slicing up food for little creatures on your creature forest you can feed them the right amount of food! The slices are thirds, halves, fourths, etc. The kids can do these games on apps or on the computer. My daughter has been playing it on the PBS kids app: Creature Duty. I went ahead and linked the exact game so you could see it in action.

Counting to 129!

This probably seems a little random. BUT we have a folder that we have turned into a number book. In each page we have a different number family. I write out the numbers in marker and them my daughter writes them below in pencil. So, the ones family, teens family, 20’s, and so on. All the way up till the 120’s family. That’s how far we have made it so far this year! So, my daughter uses this book to count all the way up to 129. We are so ready for that 100th day of school!

After 3 months of school, things look a little different than they did in the beginning. BUT that is OK, because there is still plenty of fun mixed in just different kinds of fun. PLUS, we have come a long way!

Brie