Creative Math Idea

Recently a friend gave me a plethora of school resources that she used when homeschooling her children...truly a priceless and meaningful gift!!! One thing I realize about my children is that they like to play games and they are quite competitive. However, it's just not practical for me to go out and buy a bunch of learning games. They are actually quite expensive.

While digging through this treasure chest of books, I found a book that caught my eye, "Math For Smarty Pants". One of the first exercises looked pretty interesting to me, so I tested it this morning on my 2nd grader.

It's called the $1 Word Search. Each letter of the alphabet is assigned a cent value: a=1cent, b=2 cents, c=3 cents, and so on up to z-26 cents. You take a word, any word, like "excellent" and add up the value of each letter to see if it is worth a dollar. Simple!!

Armed with a white board and a dry erase marker, we tried it out. And, yes we learned "excellent" is a one dollar word. Noah is not. Neither is Elijah. And, for that matter neither is Jesus. But, we did find that there is a Halloween word that is and it is NOT Halloween.

Well let me just say that Noah learned about ones and tens column. He learned about carrying. We talked about how to take shortcuts when adding up several numbers. We had fun learning about Math this morning. We even talked about which numbers added together equal 10. Because let's face it...it is easier to add multiples of ten.

Bottom line...we had FUN!!

So here's my idea for the next month. I am going to challenge my children to find $1 words and for every $1 word they find, I will pay them a dollar. That should motivate them!!! I figure it never hurts to practice the basics. Truthfully....I still count with my fingers...maybe I should join in the competition so that I can learn how to add in my head!!!