SCM Living Math Question

Hi Erika,

I hope your planning for the year is going well.  I’m in the throes of sketching out high school and planning seventh and ninth grades which is pretty exciting and a tad bit surreal.

I’ll do my best here:

Form II lessons are 30 minutes long which will include work on the newest concept, some time for review, as well as that five minutes or so of Rapid Oral Work (we can also call it Rapid Mental Work, Mental Arithmetic, etc.), but we are referring to the scheduled activity used for exercising tables, training habits such as fixed attention and concentration, nurturing a child to “feel at home” with numbers, as well as a tool to keep lessons exciting and lively.

So, when we discuss flow of Form II’s lessons, we can thank God that we don’t have to break down each minute as some public school teachers are required to do.  I think this is one aspect of “living teaching” to which CM refers.  If boredom is setting in during a lesson switch to some rapid oral work with lively questions. If your child is working well with the new concept of, say, addition of fractions and you just want to solidify it, then feel free to assign a few problems from the book to be written in her notebook  (a few of the illustrative questions and a few in pure number) as well as a few mixed review problems -such as reducing a fraction to its lowest terms, a multi digit multiplication problem, a long division problem and a subtraction problem.  I’m assuming the act of writing is not labor intensive for your daughter at this point.  We just want to avoid busy work.

So, take New Concept/Review/Rapid Oral Work as the spirit of the lesson and not the law.  A day you introduce a new concept might mean you take longer working with it and you have less (or no) review. If you don’t get to the review in your 25 minutes before some rapid oral work, just have her do it at the beginning of the next day’s lesson.

Use of the concrete in fractions, etc.:  There is a natural progression from concrete to abstract thinking .  At this point, illustrative questions –those interesting problems related to real life– provide that bridge of mental imagination.  Many of Strayer-Upton’s questions do give opportunity to introduce a new concept in the concrete (or go back to the concrete if your child is not wholly understanding something), such as having a child see themselves that a quarter (25c. piece) is 1/4 of a dollar; dividing a 3/4 yard length of ribbon into 1/8 yard pieces, or showing what 1/5 of a bar of chocolate is in a ten-square bar.

Some you may just have them illustrate on paper or the like as I’m not sure how many oranges or pies around you have around to cut up.  We used to have a stainless steel refrigerator and I remember my son drawing many  chocolate bars on it with dry erase marker.  Each “bar” had a varying number of squares and varying fractions of it had to be shaded in by him.

If you so desire, take a half-hour in an afternoon with all your kids to make the Butterscotch recipe on page 140 of Book 2 but have them make only 1/2 the amount -that’s the beauty of homeschooling.  You could have your child slice 2 1/2 apples up equally among four of you for a snack.  My oldest made book shelves with his dad so I was able to draw on that experience to introduce division of fractions without having him actually go out and saw a piece of wood.  The lessons are living.  One of my children needed introduction in the concrete much more than another who bridged that gap mentally and went on to abstract thinking much more quickly.

Best,

Richele