Thursday, June 13, 2013

What Have We Learned This Year?

As I complete weekly reports throughout the year, I ocassionally purposely slip in a little math, just for the record.  But really, this year, I had been feeling that we hadn't done a ton of math.  SpiderGirl never mastered the multiplication tables, worked much with area and volume, or advanced in fractions, all things that had been on her learning plan.  BatBoy has been exploring many mathematical concepts, but still, not much to go into a report.  So I thought.  When I began working on their final reports for our Distributed Learning school, I realized just how much they have learned this year.


SpiderGirl has improved in her "fluency" of arithmetic.  She accesses concepts and applies them appropriately significantly more easily than last year.  She has begun combining concepts, such as percents and fractions, to find tax for a $1.33 (1 1/3 dollars) item.  She has gained concepts and vocabulary in geometry:  faces, vertices, edges, actue and obtuse angles, regular and irregular, perimeter and area, parallel and perpendicular.  She learned to use concrete materials to solve division problems and find remainders, square numbers, and solve problems about perfect squares.  She has become comfortable solving one- and two-step algebraic equations.  And she has explored the concept of infinity, probability, Mobius strips, and tangrams.
BatBoy has explored numbers from very large to very small.  He has been counting by ones and in various patterns, and categorising numbers into odd/even, prime/composite, whole/non-whole.  He has learned how to add and subtract integers, and positive and negative fractions and mixed fractions including halves and quarters.  He has used concrete materials to multiply and divide, learned the 'doubles' of 1 to 6, and gotten to know the pattern made by exponents of 2.  He has explored symmetry, geometric constructions, and transformations.  Finally, he has exercised his logic through games and puzzles of all sorts.

When did all this happen?

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