Living Math--Estimation!

Earlier this week I was blessed to be able to attend a homeschool seminar that was filled with inspiring speakers and creative ideas. And the neat thing about this seminar in paticular was that it was completely on-line! So where ever you may be around the globe, if you had access to internet, a computer, and speakers, you could attend this seminar.

This was a last minute plan for me--I had actually never even heard of this seminar and then ended up having my name drawn for a free ticket for it--literally two days before it started!

Anyway, one of the neat topics that a speaker talked about was what she called "Living Math". Basically taking math off of a workbook page, and into real world applications. She had all kinds of examples of things she had done in her homeschool, and it really inspired me to try and be a little bit more creative in this area with Alison.

SO. Not having planned ahead for anything in paticular, after listening to this wonderful talk I looked around my house. "What do I have in my hand?" I thought to myself. Ah, I have canning jars! So I gathered up four canning jars, and then went looking for "something" to put in them.

I ended up filling jars with crayons, cotton balls, ballons, and "gems". Then I put a piece of paper next to each jar, asking Alison to make her estimation of how many of each item was in the various jars.


We let the jars sit on the counter for a day, giving her a chance to examine them and make her estimations.

Then it was time to find out how close she really came to the actual count. This was a good time to throw in some skip counting, so cotton balls were counted out in groups of 5.






Balloons were also counted into groups of 5--along with time for blowing up a balloon too, of course!

















Gems were counted into groups of 10. I didn't have enough gems in the house to completely fill up the jar, but decided to just use what I had since I didn't want to go to the store and spend any money for this activity. I do not think it detracted from the learning any, even though the jar was not filled.











Crayons were also counted out into groups of 10. And of course, decisions had to be made about crayons broken in half--do they count as 1 or 2?

Overall, Alison absolutely LOVED LOVED LOVED this activity, so I was pleased. :) Her estimations came surprisingly close to the real counts, except then I discovered that for two of the jars she had written down more than one estimation answer! Ah well. I don't really care, it didn't make a difference at all in the learning that took place. And she came away from the activity with the feeling that math is FUN and practical. Exactly what I wanted.

If anyone out there is interested in attending the next seminar, I found out they will be holding another one August 8-12, 2011. Information will be posted on www.heartofthematteronline.com The conference I attended was a shorter one, three days with three speakers a day. Tickets for it were $14.95, so I am assuming the ticket price for the August seminar may be more since it is a longer conference, and they are going to have fifteen speakers instead of nine. But whatever it is, I can honestly say I think it will be inspiring and you will be blessed by attending. If you cannot catch all of the seminars at the time they are going on live, they are all recorded and included in the price of your seminar ticket you will get mp3 files of each so you can listen to them later when it is a good time for you. If you can listen in live, though, it was really neat because up on the screen next to the speaker's power point slides there was a chat box, and you could see different comments that other seminar attendees were saying, as well as type in your own comments. I learned about some really great educational web sites from the other homeschool moms who were also listening in! And at the end of each talk, there was also a question/answer time, so if you had any specific questions that you wanted to ask the speaker you had a chance to. Those little parts you would miss if you were only getting the mp3 files later.

Oh, and I almost forgot! You can also purchase mp3 files for seminars later, even if you didn't buy a ticket and attend the seminar at the time it happened. So if anyone wanted to purchase files and listen to the Winter seminar I just attended, for instance, you could--though I have no idea what price they would charge for the files in that case. I'm sure it's on their web site, and honest--I'm not connected with this business in ANY way, other than that I just attended their Winter seminar! So all my enthusiasm is purely from my own positive experience as a seminar attendee.

Now. Go out there and find some Living Math for your homeschool students! :) And have fun!