Well no one seemed to be ill today. Although Davies ended the day with a sticky eye 🙄 and Tarly was demonstrating how quickly she can regress to toddlerdom when the mood takes her. Fortunately along came Ros with a real live toddler and made her look all big and grown up and oversized so that pretty much put paid to that 😆
We watched a load of Class TV this morning, some stuff on Famous People in history which Davies was fascinated by followed by something I’d not seen before with an animated robot getting out and about finding out about things – a bit like Bits and Bobs for the next key stage :lol:. Scarlett painted my toenails and then Ros and co arrived. The boys disappeared with a film, Scarlett stayed mostly in the lounge doing puzzles but was fairly good about letting me and Ros catch up and chat. Ady popped home for lunch and then everyone left again.
Davies wanted to know how long before Shaun the Sheep was on and I replied ‘an hour and three quarters’ to which he asked what that meant. Thinking back to a conversation with Alison last week about maths concepts and autonomy I grabbed the geomags (as we are a maths manipulative free household 😆 – and I read about Lucy using them for a similar purpose) and got him to split 12 rods into half, then showed him quarters, thirds, sixths etc. Then I wrote some of them down and showed him how they work and explained a little about lowest common denominator (although of course I didn’t call it that – just showed him how 2/6 is the same as 1/3 and that we would always write down the smallest possible numbers above and below the line) and that the whole idea of bits of numbers smaller than one whole is called fractions. Then he wrote down a few demonstrating it had totally gone in and made sense to him and then we drew some shapes and drew lines to split them in halves and quarters and shaded in things like 3/8 of the shape etc. We did a square and a circle which brought us back to telling the time where we started. So I explained that one hour can be divided into half and quarters and what 3/4 of an hour would look like. Our big clock in the lounge has roman numerals which although Davies can make sense of is not easy to read at a glance so he was asking for a watch with numbers on it. His Wallace and Gromit one he got for Christmas has lines instead of numbers so I really must get him a cheapy one for learning to tell the time with actual numbers on as he’s asked several times now. We did have one somewhere but I suspect it’s long since gotten lost in one of my clear outs. 😆 We then touched on units, tens and hundreds, again using geomags to demonstrate and writing down numbers but he’d gotten bored by then and wanted to just write numbers with lots of noughts so we called an end to that. I put Cats on that I’d got from work thinking Tarly would like the costumes, make up and songs so we had that on as background for a while.
Scarlett did some drawing and colouring in a princess activity book and Davies did some drawing too, then he watched Shaun the sheep and did some more drawing. He asked for a subject matter so I asked him to draw me things that reminded him of spring. He drew a sunset and a rainbow, a flower, a butterfly, a paddling pool and the sun. Then with fairly minimal help he wrote the word ‘spring’. He was in the right frame of mind for something more so I wrote ‘candle is a black cat’ and he read that, then he asked for a word game where I draw pictures and write the words and he has to draw a line to link them. I did star, triangle, circle and square. He got star and triangle fairly quickly but stumbled over circle (understandably) and then seemed to be working on trying to spell out square despite obviously knowing it had to be that word anyway. Then Ady arrived home.
The kids had dinner, I escaped to Tescos for an hour before coming home to cook dinner for me and A.
One word? when seven would do is brought to you today by the letter C for circle and the numbers 5, 517 and 3/4.
There you go – you see, nothing to it 🙂 And that’s KS1 fractions covered 😆
Comment by Alison — 14 March 2007 @ 9:07 am
lol, I was about to say the same thing!
Not to mention the fact that I don’t think they even *do* fractions in KS1!! (do they? maybe halves and quarters but nothing more!)
Comment by Sarah — 14 March 2007 @ 10:10 am
It’s very bizarre that they ‘do’ some fractions and not others, I’ve always thought. If you can ‘get’ the idea of a quarter then why on earth not any other fraction??
Funny that you are ‘maths manipulative free’ when we were talking about getting a base ten set today as I ended up drawing one to illustrate something about division to P! Mind you, the drawing did work…
Comment by Allie — 14 March 2007 @ 6:16 pm
Sounds like quite a moment! Questions asked and answered when ready.
Comment by Lucy — 14 March 2007 @ 7:58 pm