Beads and Pomegranate

I introduced Andy to beading by showing him my small bead collection and a trip to Ben Franklin craft store last night.  He was fascinated by all the colorful beads.  He even insisted on delaying dinner so we could finish our simple earrings project last night.

We tried out my experiment of using beads to learn simple addition this morning.  We made 3 paper boxes together: 2 for operands and 1 for sum.  He put his favorite beads in each operand box and wrote x + y on paper.  He then transfered beads one by one to the sum box and recorded the sum.  See picture captions in the album below.  He was really happy when he figured out 9+9 and told me to write "good job" on his line. I wrote "great job" with smiley.  This was a lot more fun than the conventional pictorial workbook version math intro and he got the conception of addition.

For his after-dinner "surprise" (Andy loves his "surprises" after almost every meal, usually some fruit), I said it's a food surprise and project surprise.  He got all excited.  I'd been studying this book on wire jewelry so thought to try it out on pomegranate first since I never done wire before and don't have all the stones in hand.  I cut up a bunch short links of wire, Andy stringed pomegranate seeds onto them, and then I hooked up the inks (it was a pain).  I told Andy to string on 2,3, or 4 seeds on each piece.  As I linked them up into some pattern, I asked Andy to pick the next link that would fit the pattern.  It was interesting to observe a 4-year old has no trouble recognizing 2-item pattern (e.g. ABABAB), but some difficulty with 3 (e.g. ABCABC).  It was also interesting to observe how a 4 year old observes pattern: instead of keeping track of the seed count of each link, Andy recounted every line every time (e.g. 12, 123, 1234).  So I asked him to write down the count on each link and then we just looked at the count to figure out the next one.  Then my computer mind jumped in and realized we were doing an optimization to trade space for processing time: save the results instead of repeating the counting loop.  Then my artistic mind jumped in and appreciated it as a beautiful necklace.  Thanks Ma Li for the beautiful and delicious (and so multipurpose-ful :-) pomegranate.  At the end of the day, when asked what's the funniest thing today, Andy said the eatable pomegranate necklace (I'm thinking art making and games tomorrow using the rest of the pomegranate already).  We then had a real dessert of homemade apple cake with ice cream.

When I first thought of teaching Andy math a few weeks ago, I had no clue.  I soon discovered the Costco First Grade book had pictures of 1 ball, 3 balls,  and 4 balls for kids to fill in the numbers below. Andy could do it but not thrilled.  The lesson for me: be creative and use what's at hand to make subjects fun and engaging, and that should be a big criteria of teaching.

20111110BeadPomegranateMath