RightStart Geometry, RightStart B

I asked KidV1 what she thought of RightStart Geometry so far. She says she still likes it. “Are you okay with doing it by yourself now?” “Yeah, because now I know that it’s really easy.”

In the past week she’s only done 2 lessons -- 7 and 8. Both deal with triangles. In lesson 7 she divided a triangle into 9 parts. In lesson 8 she drew, then cut out triangles. One set became Solomon’s Seal. When I first saw the lesson I thought she was going to be drawing Solomon’s Seal, which would be both tougher and (in my mind) cooler. I was prepared to totally butt in, because I wanted to draw Solomon’s Seal ... I started fantasizing about seguing into a Form Drawing lesson in which we would produce free-hand versions of Solomon’s Seal. It’s probably just as well it turned out to not involve drawing, since I had other stuff to do during KidV1’s math time (and, isn’t it the coolest, to know math is happening even though you’re in a totally different part of the house? I mean, really, the only time I saw her while she was working on math Monday was when she ran in to ask KidV2 and I if we wanted to see something really gross ... she had a string of snot stretching from her nose way out to a tissue ... one of those moments that I’m so glad I have girly girls instead of rough and tumble boys since boys concept of what’s remarkably gross is soooo far out there I don’t even want to hear about it).

The reason she only did 2 lessons this week is that she was horribly sick with a cold. She’s still not totally well. Usually we do some CalcuLadders, mostly as a way to convince her that speed can be a virtue. She’s quite a fan of lingering over any given project in the hopes of attaining some inner vision of perfection. You wouldn’t believe how many weeks she worked on Mary Had a Little Lamb on the soprano recorder before she was finally convinced it was okay to move on to other things. Anyway, we’re still skipping the CalcuLadders for now.

While KidV1 was cutting out triangles and performing ad hoc snot experiments, KidV2 and I worked on RightStart Level B lesson 19. Let’s see, we’re still working on days of the week, months of the year, what do you need to make 10 if you have 8, etc. Those were warm ups. Then we worked on the evens and odds. One of the first questions was about the Counting Stairs on the abacus -- does the student remember them? Ummm, well, the student saw those about 1 or 2 years ago while we were messing around with RightStart A, and we skipped the first few lessons of B, so I know that I sure don’t remember much about the Counting Stairs. KidV2 remembered them, though. She was suitable impressed with the entire concept of the Even Stairs, the Odd Stairs, the patterns she discovered the beads making. She found the work with the abacus wires vertical very amusing for some reason (really, I think much of the appeal is that Mommy is focussed totally on her during math time).

Then the time she lives for -- card games. The materials list claimed we needed several sets of Bead Cards, but the game directions all said “use one set of Bead Cards”. I’m glad I read ahead and didn’t bother making more Bead Cards. The games were all memory games -- turning over cards, looking for matches. They were all about Odds and Evens, and quickly recognizing bead patterns. There were 3 games which we played 2 times each. I think I got off easy (only playing 6 total rounds) because I kept winning.