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Cookbook correction

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Jax Blunt
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It’s this one: The Children’s Step-by-step Cook Book – I found it this morning in one of the stashes of stuff still unhomed after the christmas excess. She was very pleased to see it, but too busy making flowers to look through for a recipe for lunch, so I guess it’s sandwiches again.

Small agreed to do some maths, much to my surprise as he never did when we were at school, and then sat for about 50 minutes with the base ten blocks doing simple addition. Wow. Have I got a falls over backwards in shock emoticon? He wants to do two rows of sums every day because he’s good at them. Eek.

I’m now hiding while trying to remotely chivvy them into getting dressed, I’d like to do library before lunch while the sun is still shining. And I’ve done a load of washing already. Coo, how productive are we??

Comments

8 responses to “Cookbook correction”

  1. Clare avatar
    Clare

    I’ve often thought about getting base ten blocks for the girls – are they worth it, do you think? What can they do with them? We’ve got a multilink set which they use for random things. What base ten set have you got? Sorry for all the questions!

    Reply
  2. Jax avatar
    Jax

    Speaking as a Montessorian 😉 , I’m not sure how you start maths without something to do the decimal hierarchy with tbh 😀 The concept of units, tens, hundreds and thousands is introduced alongside basic counting and you get children who should understood place value as easily as they do the numbers 1 – 10. And if they do understand it and work with it easily, exchanging where required, then every addition is as easy as adding 1 – 10 as well. I timeshare this set with the portico, most montessori environments use golden beads, as described here

    Reply
  3. TBird avatar
    TBird

    nother vote for BAse 10 blocks here. Would love proper golden beads but hey I think the whole set that I have probably cost the same as one lovely golden glass ten bar!

    Reply
  4. Alison avatar
    Alison

    Yeah, I like them too 🙂 I made 2D card ones (units, tens and hundreds) for my older two girls when they were young and at Monte nursery, and used them until I upgraded to half a box of Base Ten bricks 😉
    They go a lot further than the very basics too – I’ve used them successfully with older (teenage) children to explain long multiplication and long division (which makes so much more sense if one can see what’s going, lol!).
    You can do some of it with any unit cubes and ten rods, like Cuisenaire rods, but it is nice to have the hundred squares and the big thousand cube 🙂
    And the kids seem to enjoy playing with them too, which I suppose is the main thing 😉

    Reply
  5. Jax avatar
    Jax

    Oh yes, I would always use beads for long multiplication and division, but it’s introduced with very much younger children in a Montessori method.
    Kids always love them as far as I can tell 🙂

    Reply
  6. Clare avatar
    Clare

    Thank you all! Alison – can you elaborate on the 2d card ones? Is there a photo anywhere or instructions on the web?

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  7. Jax avatar
    Jax

    If you wander around on Montessori Mom there are explanations and pics of pretty much everything. There are a number of groups dedicated to making your own montessori resources, and this is another site similar to that. hth.

    Reply
  8. Alison avatar
    Alison

    I just got some card and chopped it up into 1cm x 1cm squares for the units, 1cm x 10cm ‘rods’ for tens, and 10cm x 10cm squares for the hundreds. You could use normal squared paper to make it easy and laminate them. Then you can play around with them, see the relationships between them and so on.
    The decimal system numeral cards are useful too (and very easy to make yourself) for learning place value.

    Reply

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