Take Away Woes

As you may recall in my very first post,  I had reached an impasse with Olivia and addition.  We had to stop in our tracks and spend a couple of weeks reviewing and reviewing and reviewing.  Then suddenly, the light bulb came on and she not only had  the concept, but she leaped ahead considerably. 

So here we are 9 months later and we've run smack dab into subtraction.  We're repeating the same pattern that we used with addition.  We've stopped using the curriculum and are focusing entirely on subtraction.  One thing that has helped a great deal is The Math Worksheet Site.  This has allowed me to create lots of practice worksheets without having to write them out over and over again.

We've gone over the subtraction facts for the first 6 number families, ALOT.  We've worked the problems on worksheets using our poker chips (the entire homeschooling world uses colored bear counters, I found 100 poker chips for 50cents...you do the math).

Today we broke out the Pumpkin Pickin' Math game and worked on subtraction as a group.  Lindsey is catching on nicely by the way.

We've also been making a calendar together.  So today the girls colored the picture for the month of July (um, yeah, I'm a little behind on the coloring thing).  We used the first week to work on subtraction again, so that she could see if you're on the 7 and you move back two, you get five because 7-2=5.  This seemed to help, some...

What I found to be the most interesting of all, is lightning bug math.  Seriously, we were outside tonight catching lightning bugs and she had collected some number of bugs, I forget the exact number so lets say she had 8.   She told me that two bugs got away.  So I said "So you had 8 bugs and 2 got away, how many do you have left?"  She instantly new that the answer was 6, without thinking about it.   I'm wondering now, if one of those lightning bugs was her subtraction bulb turning on??   I guess we'll see tomorrow.