I’ve decided to try to aquire Rightstart for next year… not exactly sure how that is going to happen yet…..
Both my 3rd year and 1st year students place in Level B, and I might have a 3year old watching at times….
I’ve started singing “Yellow is the Sun”, and plan to do some practice making numbers correctly on our hands and with sticks. Once I learn the other 2 songs on the site, we can sing those too. Any other suggestions of things we could do while I work on getting the program? (ie, we don’t have the abaci, cards for the games, or anything like that….)
I also need to phone them to find out if the ONLY difference between the Canadian version and the US version is the money pictures….
And I understand that each level has a book of worksheets that is consumable…. right?
My 3rd yr and 1st yr. boys started in Level B together. One suggestion is to get two marker boards so that each boy can write their answers on the board and show you…that way they can answer independently and not hear what the other said and then say the same thing. Also make sure you have two abacus’s….each student should have their own if you are teaching them together.
When you teach them to recongnize the numbers on your hand make sure you have them start with their left hands…we read from left to right.
Just focusing on recognizing quantities up to ten is enough to do right now. Using your hands….use objects around the house….remember when showing 4 items…your child should be able to tell you four without counting…
When using sticks to show quantity help your child to see when they get to five sticks….that five has a middle and four doesn’t. This helps them recognize five. After the child can recognize five you can lay down four sticks and place the fifth stick across the other four….so then when you start workin on six your child can immediately see 5.
RS doesn’t start teaching the abacus till the child can recongnize quantities of 1 – 10 on fingers, with objects and with sticks.
Knowing this will help your children zoom through the first few lessons once you get it.
I have found dice 1-5 useful and dominos also for recognizing quantities from 1-5 and maybe 6 on the dominoes…depending on the how grouped.
also…it would be pretty easy to make dot cards or tally stick cards for practice and to play matching games…use different representations to play…ie…dot cards and finger cards (harder to draw unless artistic)…or dot cards and tally stick cards.
popsicle sticks (craft sticks) are great to lay out and recognize quantities
just teach laying the stick over the other four for five
of course you can use anything
my children love one two buckle my shoe
and in RS they practice that song until they know it well and then start saying the words softly emphasizing the numbers and then they say the odd numbers softly emphasizing the evens…
I actually found finger cards on the rightstart website (found a page with notes from conferences… there are samples of a couple of games in there too….)
So I’ll need to “teach” memory and they can do that with playing cards and finger cards…. My kids are pretty familiar with 1-2 buckle my shoe… so that is good.
And I do have tally sticks now…
I can see that having the lessons could be good… I hate having to try to figure out what to work on… lol.
The abaci are working out great so far. I plan to take a few pictures and post them on my poor neglected blog.