Cheerio Math

This has been a great week for Keidis - he likes not having to go to school!!!

Cheerios and numbers
One day I came down from upstairs and Mike and Keidis were sitting at the table with a Math Workbook that someone had given Keidis for his 6th birthday. Keidis had asked for Daddy's help to do some of the questions. So Mike sat with him and spent some time going through the questions. Keidis did about 3 pages on his own. Mike showed him how to count on his fingers first. Keidis was doing okay with this, but seemed to struggle a bit (holding the pencil, counting, and subtracting can be challenging on your fingers when you first start). I got out some Cheerios and Mike showed him how to make grouping and then combine them for adding or take away some for subtracting. He worked on adding up to 15 and subtracting from no higher than 15. Along with your standard math questions. One set of questions was 'which are the same as 7?', and then had a whole bunch of equations to circle (i.e. 9-6, 3+5, etc) and he had to pick which ones were equal to 7. Mike explained the symbols of + and - and Keidis worked through them. At one point he did a question on about the 3rd page where he looked at the question and just wrote down the answer without counting. Mike asked him how he knew that. He said he remembered it from the page before. I was glad Mike asked him that question because helping Keidis think about how he is learning and processing things is a really valuable piece of learning (if you ask me!!).