Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Why I like Math Mammoth even more now

We are up to page 80 and 81 of the Math Mammoth Light Blue Grade 3-A Worktext, in the chapter on times tables.

This is what Crayons did today for math, following the directions on those pages:

Reviewed skip counting of 2's and 4's.
Skip-counted by 10's.
Filled in a chart: 1 x 10 = , 2 x 10 = , etc.
Filled in the other half of the chart: __ x 10 = 10, etc.
Drilled fifteen multiplication facts, mostly from the 10-times table.
Drilled fifteen more multiplication facts, of the ___ x 10 type.

Answered this word problem:
a) You see chickens and cats walking in the yard and they have a total of 22 legs. How many cats and how many chickens are there?
b) Find two other solutions to the previous problem.

Did six more multiplication facts, set up vertically.

And filled in a multiplication table, with the tables that haven't been covered yet blacked out. (In other words, filling in the 0's, 1's, 2's, 4's, and 10's.)

That's it--a total of two pages (and twenty-two legs).

But this is why I really like Math Mammoth...because page 82 is completely different. At the top there's a diagram of a ruler showing 5 centimeters at the top and 50 millimeters at the bottom. First you change centimeter measurements into millimeters, and vice versa. Then you do a series of questions like this:

2 cm 2 mm = 22 mm (example)
5 cm 4 mm = __ mm
__ cm __ mm = 37 mm

Now is that a clever way to practice 10-times tables, or what? It reminds me of an exercise Charlotte Mason had her students do converting shillings and pence, to teach them something about place value.

The last activity on the page is to go around actually measuring things in centimeters and millimeters.

And then the next lesson works on the 5-times table.

I like this stuff for teaching and reviewing times tables--it's not fancy, but it's not all the same old drills either.

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