Astro Findings
Unit studies for homeschoolers that focus on the Scriptural festivals are excellent studies for your children. One of the awesome things about these unique study adventures is you can schedule them as the actual feasts are occuring throughout the year.
All ages will be able to get involved and gain insight and wisdom concerning these God ordained appointed times of celebration. Through using these unit studies for homeschoolers, you can transform these school days into feasting days.
Some Ways To Organize Your School Schedule
Take just 3 weeks out of your home schooling schedule and enjoy a lifetime of blessings! Celebrate and learn about the Feast of Passover in the springtime, the Feast of Pentecost in the summer time, and the Feast of Tabernacles in the fall.
Class Ideas
Scripture Lessons: Teach your children how the truths from these yearly feasts can be applied to their Christian walk.
Social Studies lessons: Investigate how these celebrations fit into a world history perspective.
World Geography: Get your children more familiar with Middle Eastern maps.
Home Economics: Develop some easy kitchen cooking projects as a family, making use of tasty Jewish recipes.
Arts/Crafts: Create simple fun projects to promote your children’s creative abilities.
Science: Experience the result of shaking up whipping cream.
Our Judeo/Christian Background
As Christians, there is a great deal we can learn from our heritage as grafted-in sons and daughters of Abraham. “But now in Jesus Christ, you who were once far away have been brought near through the blood of Christ.” Ephesians 2:13 “And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s seed…” Gal. 3:29 Jewish traditions are so rich in culture and life, able to teach us considerably about our Creator and His ways.
Spiritual Development Through Worship
Each biblical holiday is based on a special time of devotion and honor presented to the most deserving Father of all. In Leviticus 23, the Lord Almighty spoke to Moses declaring the feasts of the Lord as times set aside to consider His blessings. You will gain a joyful heart as you see the true character of the Lord. “…but he that is of a joyful heart has a continual feast.” Pro. 15:15
Jesus Christ As A Model For Our Sons and Daughters
Many of us homeschool to honor the direction of the Lord. Jesus set the pattern for us to follow in reverence, in submission, and in celebration. When we study the New Testament, we can see He valued the observance of the feasts as well. “And when he was twelve yrs. old, they went up to Jerusalem following the custom of the feast.” Luke 2:42
The Biblical feasts have given us such a variety of rich opportunities to teach our children through the system of unit studies for homeschoolers.
You can provide your children with a mixture of exciting options to be taught with homeschooling unit studies. To enrich your homeschooling experience, acquire some additional FREE information on the Biblical feasts here.
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Tags: unit studies for homeschoolers
Posted in Primary Education · July 22nd, 2010 · Comments (0)
Since 1990, I have taken on students of every skill level and age you can imagine, from 3 to 83, from those who could not yet count to those who just needed some brush up in preparation for calculus. A recurring theme among those students who are getting the poorest grades and that are saying they aren’t “getting it” is the inability to make tens (or nines).
Seems basic enough, but you’d be surprised at how many students come to me because they are failing algebra who can’t add fractions, multiply quickly and easily in their heads or answer simple questions like 6 plus what makes 10? Seriously: they don’t know their addends and their parents are mystified that their smart little 14 year old isn’t doing well in algebra, or worse expect they won’t do well because they themselves didn’t do well, as if poor math skills can “run in the family” due to poor math genes.
The problem, especially for girls is once they start getting bad grades in math ALL the grades suffer; not always but certainly often enough and although it is not specific to females, it is more pronounced. Studies from the University of Women and others have borne my anecdotal evidence out.
There have been long dissertations written as to why this is but the point is that it is a fact not just my opinion and further discussion is beyond the scope of this essay. Let it suffice to say males preserve their ego by thinking there is something wrong with math or the teacher if they don’t “get it” while women tend to think “there must be something wrong with me” if they don’t get it. This leads to all manner of self esteem issues and to students who graduate high school and then go on to college asking important questions like “what kind of degree can I get out of this university without taking much math?”
Recently I started doing some work at a local intermediate school, grades 6 through 8, where I am exposed to larger groups of students and can notice some trends and commonalities. I set it up so that I was allowed to work with “honors” and “accelerated” students sometimes labeled gifted and talented (”GT” for short) as well as the students who were “challenged” or receiving “F’s”.
Consistently the F students were confounded by questions like “what does four need to make ten?”, or “what does five need to make nine?” Even some of the GT kids were slow to answer or needed the aid of their fingers.
To some this is stunning. I had a parent sit in on their student’s first lesson. The parent was mortified to see that when asked some basic addends like those already mentioned and also ones past ten like “what’s 6 + 7?” or “8 + 5?” their child either responded incorrectly or took quite a bit of time to arrive at an answer. When presented with a simple fractions problem 1/2 + 1/3 the expression was one of horror. “2/5″ was the sheepish reply…
Gee, why are they having trouble in algebra?
I see it all the time. So I simply get back to basics as part of my tutoring. I remind students and parents of the five basic concepts, and make simple addition and subtraction part of their sessions every time.
The 45 addends are foundational math. It has been said that you can do all math with just addition and subtraction…it just takes longer. Multiplication is just adding repeatedly, division can be thought of as subtracting repeatedly although I personally don’t teach it that way. I find that concept based teaching makes learning math much easier but students will still run into trouble if they get bogged down in computation while they are trying to figure out what to do to solve a problem. This applies to all areas of math…whether it’s algebra or calculus or just percentages and fractions.
I can teach them what to do, but they still have problems with how to do it because they lack the most basic skill sets. The good news is these skill sets are easily learned and with a little practice easily mastered.
Any student who does not suffer from serious learning disabilities (and even then) can learn to add 3 + 7 to get 10. I have one student who is considered severely disabled but if you ask him any of the combinations for 10 he can tell you without hesitation, and certainly faster than the “normal” students twice his age at the intermediate school.
Knowing all the addends, but at leaste the two digit combinations for nine and ten are quite useful for adding any two numbers with ease. Very young students can now see that adding 7 + 5 to get 12 and adding 57 + 5 to get 62 is basically the same problem with some extra tens along for the ride…7 + 5 is always 12; the way I teach them do this is 7 needs 3 to be ten so it takes the 3 out of the 5 and there are 2 left over:
7 + 5 = 7 + (3 + 2) = (7 + 3) + 2 = 10 + 2 = 12 that process takes a long time to type out but takes a fraction of second in your head, once you understand what you are doing.
The next step is subtracting, which the way I teach it is just small addition. I taught a couple of 13 year old girls how to make change for 100.00 They were quite pleased with themselves once they figured out all they had to do was make three nines and a ten. Suddenly a problem like this took seconds:
100.00
-64.57
————
The way they did it (and this make take you a few seconds to “get”) was 6 needs 3 to make 9, 4 needs 5 to make 9, 5 needs 4 to make 9, and 7 needs 3 to make 10. We did it from left to right, not right to left and we didn’t count backwards, borrow or otherwise consternate ourselves.
100.00
-64.57
————
35.43
After just a little practice I have students who can tell me the answers to these kinds of problems as fast as I can write them on the board. Often exclaiming “WOW, that’s EASY!”
Then we can move on to problems like this:
34
-7
——
We can’t “take 7 out of 4″ (subtract 7 from 4) so we take it out of one of the 10s…so skipping a step we just add 3 to 4 and get 27. Instead of counting backwards, we just turned it into a small addition problem…we didn’t do 14 minus 7, we did 3 plus 4…ask any kid which is easier.
34
-7
——
27
Parents and teachers often have a hard time with this one even after they see it a few times, and see more examples. The point is knowing your addends makes subtraction easy and fast once you know how.
It also makes integers easy, negative numbers and their differences are a snap. Be sure to visit Crewton Ramone’s House of Math for more.
I have developed a iphone App that helps students practice the combinations for nines and tens, go to the iapp store and search Crewton Ramone or go to my website…it’s FREE.
In another article I will go on to show how knowing your addends makes learning multiplication much easier too. Addends along with simple patterning make multiplication simple, and multiplication is the first “milestone” in the mathematics because it allows you to count very, very quickly.
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Tags: math
Posted in Primary Education · January 31st, 2010 · Comments (0)