Braggin' Again

My last post was bragging about the boy. So now I need to brag on the baby. Maybe my next post will be about the big girl. Who knows? On with the talkin'.

The baby has been working on her addition. She is five and should technically be a kindergartener. What I have found typically happens in a homeschool family, the younger ones get the benefit of the older kids' education. Last school year, the boy and the big girl started the baby on addition with no prompting or help from me. They didn't want my help. Fine, you independent little beasties. It didn't happen as much during the summer, so I figured we would start at the beginning when we started this school year. Apparently, that was my bad.

The baby didn't want to start over. She wanted to continue from where she left off. So we did. She has been using some worksheets I have gotten off the internet and some that were in a math book that has been handed down. She is loving it. She won't let me help her, but she will sit with me when I grade it. We review the numbers and I have her read the number sentence to me. Repetition, repetition, repetition. She feels like a big girl.

I have some wooden manipulative blocks that the boy used. I showed her how to use them and sometimes she gets them out and makes up addition problems. Wow! Today was flashcard day and she drags her manipulatives out to use if she needed them. The flashcards have problems on both sides. We have only been doing one side of the cards, but today she was ready for a challenge. We did both sides of the cards.

She only needed the blocks for a few of the problems. We even did a few that added 10 to another number. I pulled out two sticks of tens and showed her how to use them. One time was all it took. Good grief! At one point I hear her whisper, "I know that's 10, so 11, 12, 13. The answer is 13." Yes, the answer was 13. She liked the 10 stick so much she used it for problems that didn't have 10 in them. She even used it correctly for problems with 11 in it.

My 5 year old is a math genius. Well, in my eyes she is. All I need is her doing algebra by the time she's 8. Maybe she and the boy can do algebra together and I'll only need to buy one curriculum. I have a feeling she may outgrow me. I don't like that feeling. I do like my kids being smart, though. I am going to take one step at a time, and just try to enjoy the journey.

Have a great day!