Friday, May 4, 2012

Decimals & Dolls

R11 is working with decimals. She's learning division and conversion from fraction to decimals and all the other fun things come with working with parts of a whole. I think she prefers whole numbers. Don't we all? In an effort to engage her, we've stalled in our Life of Fred Decimals and Percents to give her some increased understanding and practice.

While word problem concerning her interests are fun and easy to write, I'm going the extra mile to write problems where she has to measure and cut and make patterns and anything else I can think of to make the math problems real. Really real...not just sort of real.


I had R11 measure some items in her sewing world. I was really hoping for more decimals!

Measuring fabric to see if we can work in some division with decimals

Sometimes I'm just looking to have her convert fractions to decimals and work with the decimals.

Here's something else I must admit now. I don't make printables. There. I said it. I know there are so many homeschool bloggers out there making beautiful printables with convenient downloading at the ready. It's not really my gift. Oh sure...I can make a worksheet...used to do it all the time. But, a printable is a step up with fun graphics and for me it is not a simple way to homeschool. I waste too much time looking through membership files and websites for the perfect sheet to match our lesson and often I come up empty handed. Sometimes I do find just the sheet, but then all this time has gone by.

So, I grab a sheet of lined paper and I create. 

Fast, easy and not really professional at all, but we get to the doing. And that is what matters.

2 comments:

Mary Prather said...

I would be interested to know if you think Life of Fred is worth the investment for decimals and percents. That's where we are at right now and I'm trying to make it more real world for my oldest. We read a book from the library all about the metric system that was really good, and I'm on the hunt for more living math!

Heather said...

Mary I love Fred. He makes kids think and for $16 for a hard bound, reusable text? Yes! It's worth it at any level.

Fred comes at problems from another perspective and teaches kids to read and learn for themselves.

I use Fred with Math on the Level and mostly if Fred gets difficult, we take some time to hover there and do some other practice and bring it around another way. Then we get back on board with Fred and finish it out.