Small Victories

Victory 1: My kids giggled big time as I was reading The Twits. The premise and the whole sequence of tricks these two bad people play on each other were so amusing that I kept on reading and reading.
Victory 2: I have been teaching Sunlight boy math since August 2013. We started with the K-level books of the Singapore math series, and we only recently switched into the Grade 1 books. Most of what we cover now is review. Today, we counted 1 group of 10 flowers and 6 alone flowers. Before I even came around to asking how many flowers there are altogether, he said 16. Score!

Not a victory: Math for Ballet girl. She is very smart but today she said that math is not as fun as reading. Actually, this is to be expected. She is just getting into the 'I am reading fluently' phase, and this new freedom is exactly that-freedom. She can pick and choose at her own time. I am moving on very slowly with math right now because we encountered a stumbling block-adding fractions with different denominators. So, while we are still set to be done with 4A and 4B by July, I will drag subtraction addition and subtraction until the end of March. Then we will go on cruise control with most other topics which we have already one way or another touched on.

Update 2/28/2014: Last night Sunlight boy correctly, before counting to confirm, stated that 10 sticks and 7 sticks are 17 sticks. He proceeded to correctly calculate for a few other examples. We always confirm by counting from 10 up to solidify the understanding and the confidence in the process.
I feel as thrilled about this milestone as I felt when Ballet girl understood this (she was a little younger than Sunlight boy is now). This is the single stepping stone to all of math from now until fifth grade. The second the child understands that we collect things in groups of 10s and 100s just to make our lives easier and not because of any other reasons, the door for complete understanding is wide open. Math becomes a meaningful flow, not a mystery.
Yesterday I showed ballet girl some shortcuts to addition (people call it mental math). We calculated the addition in a few ways to demonstrate that there are some convenient ways of rearranging things so that we easily recognize the answer.  Here is the example. What we typically do is this: 7+8=8+*******=(8+**)+*****=10+5=15. Since she knows without thinking that 5+5=10, I showed her this:
7+8=(5+**)+(5+***)=(5+5)+**+***=10+5=15. We easily recognize that 10+5 is 15, so we try to get the 10 in the easiest possible way.
Mental Math should not be introduced until the child has a solid grasp of the meaning of the mathematical process and is given a justification, a solid basis for the reason the shortcut is good, efficient. Kids appreciate efficiency, we might as well, say it-what we tell you is nothing new, it's just a convenience. As is the ATM-you can go to the clerk and wait in line or you can drive through-same outcome, different interaction.