Aspen and RightStart™ Mathematics Level A Lessons, Installment #4

Aspen has been doing great in her lessons, however is at times getting frustrated as she feels she is not learning fast enough. For example, when were were doing a lesson and using the AL Abacus to double check her addition, she thought she would be “cheating” if she used the abacus itself. I asked her why she felt it was cheating, and she replied that it made it easier, so it must be cheating. She’s really trying to use her mind’s eye, and it took some convincing that it’s perfectly fine to keep using the abacus for now, and for the next levels as she needs it.

Aspen is truly loving the lessons regarding the coins. She has made a game out of dumping out my purse so we can go through the coins to add. She struggles a bit with the dimes and the nickels. I have a feeling that the size confuses her a bit between the two coins, as she’s noted that the bigger one should be more. We’ll just have to keep playing with the money, as she has to add it together in order to put it into her piggy bank.

Aspen’s favorite game thus far has been the addition memory game. She absolutely loves it when she can say what she needs before asking for help or using the abacus. On occasion she still uses it, as she tends to get stuck on the 7′s and 8′s when coming up with the other addend to make 10. Now any normal memory game is a little boring to her without the added challenge of addition.

Partitioning for Aspen has been a bit challenging when using the Part-Whole Circle sets. She does well with the abacus, but when the circles continue to be brought into play, she seems to have a bit of a road-block when she looks at them. Eventually she gets it, but they do frustrate her. When having the two parts, she comes up with the whole easily, however, determining the part, when the whole and one part are given stumps her, and she takes a bit of time to come up with the answer. She tries to do it in her head, but quite often grabs her abacus to find the answer.

Aspen has been doing fairly well with telling time. She has been working on it, and loves to try to figure it out. She seems to really struggle with it, when she has to note if it’s bed time. Imagine that! If you tell her to note when it is time to go to the pool or somewhere fun, then she does seem to be at the top of her game.    She is pretty confident in the whole and half hours, but the other variations still cause her a bit of confusion.

Aspen was working with her dad doing the teens with her school work, and was getting really frustrated. I grabbed her abacus and we did the RightStart way of saying the teens, such as 1 Ten 3, then she was easily able to come up with the correct number, and quickly converted it to the conventional number way: 13. Her dad just looked at her, and was surprised by how she was able to come up with the correct answer going that route, as opposed to just knowing the convention number off the top of her head. He’s really noticing how well she is doing and is attributing it to her using RightStart in helping her advance in her math skills.

Aspen has been becoming a great cook’s helper, as she loves to help with the measuring and mixing. She gets to help find the correct measuring unit, either in the measuring cups or spoons to help create our kitchen masterpieces. (At least she things they are.) She is getting to be consistently correct, and going through the lesson on fractions was quite easy for her. She did extremely well when working on the second edition fraction lessons (as I had an advance copy). She didn’t call them the correct name, for example called the thirds “threes” instead, but after corrected, she flew through the lesson and found it to be so much fun. She is continuously playing with her Fraction Puzzle and Fraction Magnet we have located on our refrigerator.