Craft Sticks Place Value Village

Silas has been using Math Lessons for a Living Education {Book One} this year. It is a fantastic math book that he has been flying through! You may remember the trouble he was having last year with recognizing his numbers 6 to 10. This year, he is having no trouble at all recognizing numbers! When we started the chapter on place value and numbers in the teens, I was a little nervous. However, he knows all of his numbers now, 1 to 20!

Math Lessons for a Living Education has you make a Place Value Village for your child to demonstrate the ones, tens, and hundreds place values. I have never done this before with my older children, but I knew it would help Silas. The book instructs you to use a small, medium and large container for the ones, tens, and hundreds, along with dry beans and zip lock bags to represent the numbers. It also provides templates for the containers, which I printed on colored paper, laminated, cut out and taped to our containers. We are using small, clear plastic containers from Miracle Whip and coffee. We did it this way the first day.

Then, I saw what my friend at a Beauty Full Slow uses to count their school days - craft sticks. Aaah! Why didn't I think of this before? We have bags upon bags of craft sticks, and I knew the multi-colored ones would look so fun and be much easier to work with than the small beans! I "stole" her idea, and bundled a few groups of ten craft sticks with elastic bands, and left 9 craft sticks loose in the ones container.

I would show Silas a flashcard of a number, like 14. He knew there was a "ten" in the tens container, and he would put 4 craft sticks in the ones container. We did this with several numbers, and he enjoyed it! This really helped him to visualize the numbers and will be such a great tool to use when we begin addition with two digit numbers.

How do you teach place value?

Simple Homeschool: Don't Fix What Isn't Broken

Homeschooling is not always easy, especially when I start playing the comparison game. I'm sure you've played it a time or two yourself, and it's not a fun game to play because nobody wins.

"My 8th grader isn't doing as much grammar as so-and-so's 8th grader...maybe she's behind? Maybe she won't be able to go to college? I need to order a bigger, more expensive, better grammar curriculum!"

"My 6 year old isn't reading yet, and so-and-so's 6 year old is already reading books and writing sentences. Mine doesn't know what a sentence even is! Maybe we should buy what their child is using and do that."

"My 6th grader doesn't read as much history as so-and-so's 6th grader. He will never learn history! I need to change his curriculum to a literature based history curriculum and buy all the books I can and make him read them all."

"My 8 year old's math program isn't as rigorous as so-and-so's math program. My goodness, she is still reviewing tally marks and clocks! She's never going to know multiplication and division! Let's change her curriculum and make her do multiplication and division every day! Drill, drill, drill!"

Please tell me I'm not the only homeschooling mom who has had these {crazy and irrational} thoughts run through her mind...I hope I'm not alone here.

I am making an effort to simplify my homeschool for this very reason - to avoid the comparison trap. I'm tired of comparing my {wonderful, smart, creative, individual} children to everybody else's children. My children are different from every single child in the world - and that is a beautiful thing! That's one of the reasons I homeschool and something I try to teach my children, so why do I struggle with it?

I have been reflecting on all of the things that work in our homeschool, and funny enough, it's not the expensive, shiny, new curriculum - it's the simple things. This is a not a new revelation to me - I've realized this several times that I've been reflecting on our homeschool. It is something that I forget {for some reason} and have to remind myself of. I am so tired of worrying, so tired of fretting and comparing and changing things and trying to fix what isn't broken.

A simple homeschool is what I am going to work toward. No more buying new curriculum mid-year because I don't think my child is 'learning enough'. No more changing methods because I think that this way is better than that way. No more second-guessing myself or my children.

We are going to do things the simple way, the way that has worked for years and years.

*gasp* I'm going to keep using the curriculum we are using - for the whole year.

I am going to find ways to simplify our homeschool. I hope to make it a weekly or bi-weekly topic on the blog, full of ideas and ways to make things simple. I hope you will leave me comments with ideas and ways that your homeschool is simple.

My first tip is just this: Don't fix what isn't broken.