Holiday from Geometry

I was going to say "Math Holiday", but that isn't accurate. We've been doing some long division, working out of RightStart Level E, and also in Murderous Maths (beloved math books that they are). And also a fair bit of real life math, including some of the mathy bits at The Magic House , which had Homeschool Day yesterday.

Kid2 is getting back into the swing of doing RightStart Level B. We've picked up right where we left off, with the introduction of the Base 10 cards. I figured we might as well pull out the Cuisenaire Base 10 block set, by golly, since that's what the cards are picturing. This set off a spate of building:





We have the wooden set. And we've discovered that you can use all the hundred flats and 10 rods to build a tower, peopled with the little ones cubes. You can even take away some of the 10 rods and retain structural integrity. But if you take off the topmost hundred flat, the tower collapses. Interesting, eh? And we also discovered that if you repeatedly knock over the tower on purpose you eventually crack one of the hundred flats, and Mommy gets all out-of-sorts and delivers a stern lecture about the number of building blocks we own which could be used for this purpose, for pete's sake, so why are we bashing around the math manipulatives? (leaving kids to wonder why Mommy was taking pictures of the tower if she was going to turn around and get all cranky about it, but that's sort of outside of the realm of "learning about math").