Awkward Adventures in Arithmetic

We have entered the Carrying Zone. Yup, Jimmy is learning how to carry the one. I was NOT happy about how Abeka explained it. Even I was confused at their explanation! There were straws in groups of tens & individual straws… but the story that went with them didn’t quite seem to add up to the answer they gave. I think it was all there, but it wasn’t very clearly laid out for the poor teachers! So I gave up on the manual’s lesson & made up my own. I used pennies & dimes, since Jimmy is getting very familiar with coins. He & I worked out several math problems with the coins – some that required carrying and some that didn’t. He counted the pennies, then the dimes. Whenever we worked a carry-the-one problem, he traded in 10 pennies for 1 dime. That dime was the carried one. I thought this was working really well until Jimmy said, “But Mom, I thought we always counted the higher value coins first.” Well, yeah… but… um… not this time… Sigh.

Caleb was NOT helpful during this mess. After behaving really well all week, he decided that today was the day to act out. Sigh. I had to send him downstairs to play. He cried instead. More sighs. Some days, it all goes well; somedays, nothing seems to go well.

It was finally time to turn to the classwork sheet. Ok, now I’m annoyed – THIS is a MUCH better explanation!!! Why in the world didn’t we LEARN IT this way??? Grrr. When Jimmy first learned to add two-digit numbers together, the worksheets had a line to divide the ones’ & tens’ columns. The lines went away once he got comfortable with the process (add the ones’ first, then add the tens’). For a carry-the-one problem, they put the line back & added a box above the tens’ column for the carried one. It took working through one of these problems for Jimmy to figure it out completely. And was just making sure he knew the process. So what was up with the bundles of straws? Really!!

Ok, got that out of my system. Besides the Awkward Adventures in Arithmetic (ooo, good post title… be right back… ok, changed it), we had an awesome week with Psalms & spelling. Jimmy practiced his newest spelling list on Monday & Wednesday with a quiz today. The list included “two,” “four,” “six,” “eight,” a few “ight” words, a few “uck” words, and a few “ay” words (like “way” & “stay”). On his quiz today, he got them all correct except “four” (which he spelled “fuor”) and “stay” (which he spelled with a a/g hybrid, making us both giggle). Awesome job, dude!! When I told him that we were having that quiz today, he threw a fit because he didn’t think he was ready to spell “eight”. Whoop whoop!

I was very impressed this week with our discussions after reading one of the Psalms each day. Jimmy has been picking out words & phrases that he doesn’t understand. I explain the definitions, and then we discuss what they might mean from a poetic standpoint. I saw a lot of progress in his ability to look at phrases from a poetic standpoint versus a matter-of-fact one. Today’s big topic was “my wounds fester” – we discussed what infected wounds would literally be, and then talked about how someone’s guilt might feel like an infected wound without actually being an infected wound. Even Caleb hopped into the discussion, asking about another phrase that he didn’t understand, “treacherous deeds.”

All in all, it was a good week. Shame that it ended on a difficult note with the carry-the-one issue, but it was a good reminder that *I* am the teacher, that I shouldn’t rely on the teacher’s manuals alone. I am responsible for setting a pace for each of my children that meets their skill levels, challenging them without overwhelming them.