Learning to be Inventive

Learning to be inventive...yeah we're talking about me, not the kids! lol...I recently joined Pinterest. Refused to have something else take up my time. I find myself scouring the internet all the time for ideas I never make time to use, so I was thinking, "Why torture myself furthure and join this site?" Welp, I gave in. I saw a pin that sparked an idea. We've used baby wipe boxes to put our playing cards in just like a pic on Pinterest. I've seen people store a variety of items in these wonderful freebees, but I never thought of taking a picture of the item as a label. So this is what I've started doing. Sorry, the pic is dark...too lazy to go edit my mistakes...

Maybe I was on an inventive high because when the boys finally destroyed their abacus alphabet, I got an idea. I have no other way to describe this toy. It was the whole alphabet on this stand that stood up. Each block was on these rods. Looked like an abacus only with these block letters. I finally finished their job and broke the whole thing apart and ended up with this:

I thought and thought and all of a sudden. Tadah! Use them for lacing! And they can lace the alphabet in order! The boys enjoyed it!

I had them working together. Isaac would figure out which letter went next, he'd ask Eli to help find the letter, and then Isaac would lace it. Good practice for both boys!

Eli with his Pooh face. Hmmm....Let's see....

Teaching Math

Okay....so in teaching Isaac math...I've tried to do the Coming to Know Number way (a book I got in college)...getting him to see numbers as groups and stuff. Like automatically recognizing at 6 by seeing two groups of 3, and thereby learning 3+3, or 2+2=4 so 2+3 is one more, so it must be 5. I do all those "cute" inventive ways to get them to not rely on just counting/counting on. Sometimes it works, but sometimes Isaac naturally returns to counting on. I can't help but think here that the people that wrote that book obviously have not worked with kids. lol...Memorization is detrimental they cry! I understand their point. Some kids never really learn how to work with numbers and always rely on memorizing or algorithims. Isaac really seems to prefer just counting/counting on or memorizing flash cards. It is fun to him. I guess as long as you introduce different ways of thinking of numbers, its just fine and dandy if they take to memorization first rather than seeing groups or grouping numbers. I mean, it worked for me, so....and I still learned other ways of looking at things as I got older. So that is my conclusion. Developmentally, some kids aren't ready to learn the way this book suggests (although they claim they are!). Some kids don't conserve yet, duh! Introduce a variety of ways to solve or think of numbers and let them choose what works for them at their developmental stage.