We haven’t consistently done Bear School in a long time. Consistency in anything has been a challenge, actually, but we have managed to get the routine on school days more or less set in stone. Little EC still loves school like crazy. We had parent-teacher conferences a couple weeks ago (video conference, of course…nothing can be normal these days) and the teacher said she was very advanced verbally for preschool—and that despite being by far the youngest in the class. They’ve noted her literacy at school, and we have noticed it coming out in new ways at home as she is starting to try to read things around her independently (not with a lot of success yet, but the effort is clear). So a couple weeks ago I decided to try a new variant to up her numeracy.
She has a collection of little plastic “counting” bears that came as a gift from Grandma long ago. At first we used them to do patterns, to sort by colors and size, and some simple counting, but after awhile they became just more toys to be played with and imagined with (“choirs” of bears were a popular one). I used these bears as the basis for Bear Math. I now know that she has 31 of them (I don’t know how many came in the set originally!).
On a piece of paper, I drew three large boxes, with the first two separated by “+” and the second two by “=”. Under each box I drew a line on which to write a number, and also separated them by “+” and “=”. Then I put some bears in the first two boxes, say two and three. Then I showed her: count the bears in the first box, and write that number on the line below the box. “2”. Then count the bears in the second box and write that number on the line below. “3”. Then comes the fun part: push all the bears together into the third box, then count the bears in the third box and write the number on the line below. “5”. Then read it out loud: “The equation says: two plus three equals 5”. She caught on to this protocol right away, and within five or six iterations we were doing arbitrary additions that even made it into the double digits, even some numbers that she didn’t know how to write and I had to help with.
With that down, we changed the protocol: I would write the numbers on the lines below the boxes: “4” and “5”. Then she would count out four bears into the first box, five bears into the next box, then push them all together into the third box, count them out—”9″—and write that onto the third line. Then read it out loud: “Four plus five equals nine”. She picked up on that straightaway too. And now she just does it. I think she’s even become a little bored by it, because while she asked me often to do it in the first few days, she now doesn’t want to even when I suggest it.
There are two possible directions to go from here. I can either introduce subtraction through a similar protocol, or I can move the addition to higher numbers and introduce the concept of the tens place (one cheese cracker = 10 bears, and can be consumed on completion of the problem). I haven’t decided which to do yet.
In other “academic” news, she has been “studying” for awhile now, since she got a pad on which to write letters from Nana. She will sit with the pad on her lap, and look at the example letters on the inside cover, and practice writing letters. For the most part, she can form them all now, though “s” is tough (as is “5”, come to think of it). Just last week, she for the first time came home from school with her own untraced rendition of her name written on a piece of art: she had copied it from the name tag on her desk.
Like any good dad, I’m exceedingly proud and I think she’s the smartest four-year-old alive. But unlike other dads, I’m right.