Had a pj day today as we weren't going out and about. Must admit wasn't helped by me waking up with sinus headache, so a reasonably slow start. But I'm getting ahead of myself....
Yesterday we attacked some maths problems. Callum has basically mastered the basics of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division which we've been concentrating mainly on this year. He's doing all of the above with small, medium and large numbers, decimals and fractions, so I think it's time to start using what we've learnt in a more useful way instead of just doing reams of sums. He's getting bored anyway. So I've managed to get hold of a set of books from Brain Academy..
www.thebookpeople.co.uk/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/qs_product_tbp?storeId=10001&catalogId=10051&langId=100&productId=271362&searchTerm=brain+academy
I know that they are a little young, but I have discovered that they do older versions of the books, so I'm going to start with these and work upwards.
Basically they are a series of 'missions' using maths to solve them. They are pretty easy, but because they are written differently you have to think them through logically. Callum found the first one a little difficult as he was trying to over complicate the question, but once he'd broken it down and read through it properly he really enjoyed them.
We went over some measurement conversions afterwards, so we finished on something really really easy.
Then as I had an appointment with the bank in the afternoon, I left him with his sister, Terri, and they finished off his chinese dragon which we started ages and ages ago and just never got round to finishing before the dining room got totally shut down for redecorating.
Now back to today. We continued with the 'using maths in the real world' theme by attacking the kitchen for a baking session. We are holding a Charity Tea Party next Saturday and are in the process of making all the cakes for it. So we used multiplication to double recipe ingredients and weights and measures to actually make the cake. Then we made a list of all the cakes we want to make and calculated all the ingredients we needed to make them, using multiplication and addition. Then we weighed out all the ingredients we already had and used subtraction to calculate what we needed to buy. With our list complete and our cakes cooked, we finished our day. I ended up curled up watching TV progs I'd recorded dosed up with pain killers and Callum went back onto the computer to play Roblox.
So not an overly productive day, but not a complete waste either.
Cya
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