Math as a form of torture

Emma, Soren and I hit the math workbooks on Friday for a few hours. It was a challenging experience, and we didn't get nearly as far as I would have liked. The girls complained all morning about having to do it, so I'm thinking about doing it first thing next time to eliminate that. Of course that doesn't eliminate the complaining *while* we're doing it...

I'm also thinking of working with them one at a time. They would hit things they didn't understand, and one would be stalled while I helped the other. I tried to mitigate this by having them go forward to a question they understood while I helped the other one, but this wasn't all that effective, because Soren hit a whole section that she didn't get.

Emma needs to acquire a fluid understanding of fractions, decimals, and percentages, and how to perform mathematical operations on all of these. She also needs to be able to perform long division and multiplication of large numbers without assistance. I'm tackling the fractions, decimals and percentages by showing how they are all different ways of expressing ratios. So we spent some time converting decimals and percentages into fractions (which I think is the most sensible form for performing mathematical operations). We went through addition of fractions, using least common denominators, and multiplication of fractions, using examples that sparked "a-ha" moments. We went through the fact that any number can be expressed as a fraction by putting it over one, and that any number over itself is equal to one, and why those things are so. This took a while. Luckily, Soren was able to listen in and understand some of it. She helped us find least common denominators and do the basic mathematics involved in the problems we were using as examples.

Soren kind of hit a brick wall when the fourth grade problems started talking about fractions and percentages. She's not ready for some of the problems. We worked on prime numbers and how they're defined. She's interested in things like why all prime numbers are odd (except 2). I think next time, I'm going to cover some basics with both of them and pick out workbook problems that relate to what we talk about.

The biggest problem I had was attitude. They definitely seem to dread working on math, and their attention spans were discouragingly short. Hopefully we'll get to the point where they start to see the magic.
I think I'm going to turn multiplication tables into a car thing on the way to gym. They seem to enjoy doing things like that much more in the car. Probably because there's not much else to do.