Homeschool Math Blog

If you will allow... :)  This is my 8-year old daughter's website that she recently was able to put online: Children's Best Activities I especially like her "find-the-twins" printables - in other words, find the matching pairs (good for kindergarten/preschool). She made most of those herself, and some of them are tricky! (A few were taken from a clipart collection we own rights to--that's where she got the idea for them.) Of course I've had to help her, but really only with the framework (website). She's created the content.

... this free e-book is meant for preschool-kindergarten age kids, and you can download it here . It's not my book, but courtesy of  Renee from SchoolSparks.com

Bon from Math is not a four-letter word made this little counting song, sung to the tune of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star". Hope your little ones enjoy it!

Renee from SchoolSparks.com is offering a totally free ebook for kindergarten math ! It basically is a worksheets collection for K, colorful and beautiful. The book covers number recognition, counting, patterns, sorting and classifying, and an introduction to graphs, and has 53 pages. In addition to this very nice e-book, Renee also has hundreds of free kindergarten worksheets for parents and teachers to download and use at home or in the classroom.

I just found this picture that I took of the fact families my 4-year old wrote on the whiteboard - totally on her own. There was a time she loved writing fact families like this every day. Being able to choose different color markers plus it being on the whiteboard seemed to be the main motivating factors, because she didn't want to write them on blank paper... Kids are funny. Then again, it allows us teachers to use colorful markers as a "motivational tool" : ) Anyway, I was really happy that she had grasped the concept.

Image by Stopnlook In the past few days I decided it's time for my younger girl to start learning how to recognize coins and learn the cent-values of various coins. She's generally been doing kindergarten-1st grade addition and subtraction and I figured she's ready. First, I got a pile of pennies, a pile of nickels, and a pile of dimes (no quarters at first). We played where I told her to make a certain amount, such as "Make 24 cents." She made it, I checked. Then she told me to make some amount. We just take turns. It's like a game, and great fun for her! I figure it'll work the same with other kindergarten or 1st grade kids. Since she did pretty good, I was able to introduce quarters the next day. I showed her that two of them makes 50, and we practiced making 62 or 58 or other such amounts that use 2 quarters. Then I showed her a quarter and a nickel, and we figured out how much that was. That's always a difficult thing - to combine just one quarter...

When I was a kid, my mom sometimes bought my brother and me activity books to fill up our summer time. Well, if you're into activity books, here's a Sticker Math Fun by Usborne that I can recommend for summer math learning and practice (grades K-2) (or for later in the school year as well, for that matter) . It has different mathematically-sound activities for addition, subtraction, beginning multiplication, fractions and clock, mostly on about 1st grade level but some for kindergarten and some for 2nd. It is filled with quite variable and creative activities, and not just dull simple adding and subtracting. The activities include missing addends or subtrahends, number patterns, finding numbers that add up to a certain number, and so on. It is in full color with kid-friendly imagery. We bought this book several months ago, and I can say my kindergartner-1st grader has really enjoyed the book! And the third grader has wanted to do several pages as well. The normal price is ...

People occasionally ask me about kindergarten math, and if I'm going to write kindergarten level books for the Math Mammoth series. The answer is no, I don't feel there's any need for me to write books, because there already exist plenty of good materials for these very basic and easy concepts. BUT I did write a comprehensive article about what you can do in kindergarten math , including many games you can play, and what basic concepts should be covered in order to prepare for 1st grade.

How to teach subtraction in the kindergarten with the tens place values and in horizontal sequence, for eg, 20-5=? They know to count their fingers, from the smaller number to the bigger number, but when the fingers are not enough to count, then what? I'm not sure kindergartners are necessary ready for this. I would ONLY do these types of problems with concrete help. Get a 100-bead abacus. Instruct them to first "make" 20 or show 20 on the abacus, and then move 5 away. Then "see" how many are left. This online abacus is also really good for illustrating such. Once they've done 20 - 5 and many other problems, you can ask if they notice a similarity in these problems: 10 - 5 20 - 5 50 - 5 70 - 5 etc. But if some don't, wait till 1st grade. Practicing problems that "cross the ten" without manipulatives, such as 23 - 5 or 71 - 9, can wait even till 2nd. I realize kids might be able to do them by counting down, but to learn effective strategies f...

I recently talked with a friend who was concerned about the cost of math curricula for her soon-5-year-old, doing kindergarten math. Even regarding my ebooks which I've given her free access, she mentioned how even printing costs money and could get costly in the long run. (And I know some people can print things real cheap, but not everyone. It depends on your printer.) So I told her, teaching math doesn't have to cost anything in kindergarten or the early grades. It's not of utmost importance to do worksheet work. You can largely just play games and explore various things. After all, playing is what that age kids do best anyway. * Playing board games where you roll one die teaches them to recognize the dot patterns on the die. * Later on, playing board games where you roll two dice can be used for addition practice. * After learning the dot patterns on a die, use dominoes as "flash cards" for addition. Or better yet, make a simple game out of it: lay them righ...