A walk to the stables

A walk to the stables
Tamerin at the horses: we walked there on Thursday and talked rugby nearly all the way!

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Fractions

This week we did some division with remains. Tammy struggled a bit with this, so we used the number line and piled the threes / fours onto the right spots: 3, 6, 9, 15 etc. She could then easily count how many threes there were in 28 etc. The remains were always expressed as a fraction e.g. 16/3 = 5 and 1/3. In the beginning she confused 1/3 and 2/3 but she soon caught up and "loved" this work.
However, I picked up that her tables were a bit rusty. This surprised me, because she really knew them exceptionally well: not only in sequence, but also when asked at random. Anyway to make "math" a bit easier we are back onto multiplication, but this time "longer" multiplication e.g.
27
x5
135

We converted miles to kilometers. (1 Mile = 1.6 km). She liked this. This was necessary to understand High School Musical 3 better and also to help her prepare for the U.S. trip and in any case it is problem solving and practice in multiplication and decimals.

She is busy writing a letter to Zac Efron. Formulating questions is still very difficult for her, but we are working on it. Spelling and reading ability are improving by the day, but she still needs a lot of guidance with comprehension. (There has been a vast improvement, but she still needs considerable practice before she will really be able to read a book on her own just for fun.).

Other new activities include water aerobics and swimming lessons and guitar lessons. In all of these she shows promise. (I will blog about these activities later.) Right now we are waiting for her guitar instructor. She has just had her 3rd swimming lesson. After lunch break she came up to finish her Zac Efron letter, but since I started blogging during break (and thus occupy the computer), I asked her to start on the multiplication homework work sheet so long. Guess what she said? "I would like to do division by 3...!"

She has done 3 multiplication problems while I've been typing this paragraph, but she forgot to add the tens, so I'd better stop babbling and help her.

Homeschooling is great! Have a great week.

5 comments:

Rob said...

If you ever try to help Tammy with her guitar playing yourself, you might enjoy reading my easy guitar songs for kids article on my blog. It's for total beginners and little kids--don't know how far along she is.

Rob

Happy Elf Mom (Christine) said...

Hey, Miekie, I've been wanting to comment for a bit, but I keep paging back through your old articles LOL. I have bookmarked the Christmas ones with the little toilet paper manger people. How cute!

Miekie said...

Thanks Rob, will check it out! She is still beginner beginner.

Hi Mrs. C
Thanks for visiting and thanks for the comment!

Heather said...

That's a great idea for fractions... I will have to remember that! My leg is doing a little better, but I am still quite far from running. (I am happy not to be limping right now!) I am pretty sure I tore my calf muscle. Where in the US will y'all be going? Mississippi? Ha ha, not the destination of choice for most people! Thanks for your Latin comment. I definitely want them to have a good understanding of Latin and then move towards fluency in Spanish. How do you do it there? One language at a time/ or work on them all at once? Parlez vous francais? Je parle un peu francais, mais il y a 15 ans depuis j'ai etudie.

Miekie said...

Chere Heather
Je parle un peu francais, mais j'ai oublie beaucoup. (Il y a beacoup d'annee depuis j'ai l'etudie!) Quand quelqu'en ne peut pas parler francais comme les refugees de (du?) Congo ou Burundi, je me trouve que c'est possible de encore parler francais! Mais quand les gens peuvent parler seulement un peu d'anglais, mon francais disparait! J'ai honte!
The ideal here is that every child is taught in their mother tongue, but very often schooling starts through another medium - usually English or Afrikaans. (Afrikaans is very similar to Dutch). The second language is introduced in pre-primary school and gradually gets more and more attention: reading and writing it start in Grade 3. 3rd languages (local ones) are introduced later in primary school and other languages like European languages, only in High School. (Sadly our education has really deteriorated the past 15 years -despite a huge budget, i.e. a very expensive no good education!)
I'm not going to the U.S. with Tammy and her folks - their plans have not been finalised yet, but will definitely include Texas (business) and Disney World.
I'm glad your leg is on the mend. Be patient!