Mr. Gallon Man---Equivalent Liquid Measurements

 We have reached a point in our Saxon 3 Math where we needed to find equivalent measurements of liquids.  I had seen this fun visual somewhere out there on the world wide web so today we recreated it to remind us of these measurements. 

Mr. Gallon Man

 4 quarts equals one gallon

 2 pints equals one quart....and 8 pints equals one gallon

Finally, 2 cups equals one pint....or 16 cups equals one gallon.  

We have now hung Mr. Gallon Man on the learning wall to remind us of equivalent liquid measurements.  

Steam Puff Number Train

All aboard the number train!

I saw this idea shared over at BookWorms BookNook, and thought it was just the thing for my train loving littles. It is a perfect activity to help teach numbers and counting.

The printable train I used can be found here.

I printed out 10 trains and Laura colored them the same for me. I wanted them the same because I didn't want tricky Kim and Luke remembering the order of colors as opposed to recognizing the numbers.

I labeled each train 1-10.
The first job for the kids is to line the trains up in numerical order. Kimberly used the 1-5 trains and Luke used all 10 trains.

The next step is to put the matching number of puffs of smoke over the smokestacks of the trains. Our puffs of smoke are cottonballs.

Kimberly did such a good job working with the 1-5 number trains,

she did a little victory dance,

and more dancing,

and still more dancing.

She knew how much it made us laugh the first time, she now does her dance after everytime she works with her trains successfully.

Luke has a much bigger task, using all 10 of the trains. He was perfect with the numbers 1-5 and now he is quickly learning 6-10.

He did a perfect job counting out the cottonballs, but he still needs help recognizing those larger numbers.

Success!!

Our Money Lapbook

This post highlights the money lapbook Grace and I made over the last 2 weeks. This post is also to show GRANDMA that we do real schoolwork around here and not just play with goo, bubbles, and fingerpaint.

A lot of the ideas for this lapbook came from Carisa, at 1+1+1=1. Carisa has also graciously provided printables for many of the elements seen here.
Above, Grace is simply sorting coins. The strip at the left helps her to remember the names and values of each coin. This was the first thing we did as we began to learn about money.
Inside: a very cute money poem-which has been memorized, a little book about coin value, and pet store money cards-used to practice counting coins.

The link to the Pet Store money cards is here.

Gracie can learn to spell using this element of the lapbook.
Hard at work.

This Piggy Bank Coins book can from

Enchanted Learning.

This book I put on the back of the lapbook. It is also from Enchanted learning.

inside the book

Gracie has a hard time remember the value of quarters, so I made up this little chart to help her.

This little fan booklet shows ways that we can save money written on it.

Here Mark and Grace are racing to put the correct amount of money on the pet store cards.

So, Grandma, if you have read this far, real learning does go on in "the little house".

Number Families

Gracie's math book has started to talk about "number families" and she is beginning to name the numbers 1-100. She has been having a hard time with this so I set out to figure out a game we could play that would help her review her numbers, and this is what I came up with.

We are using our BINGO number cage (which turning is fun in itself) and we are putting the bingo numbers onto index cards that I have labeled for each "family"ex.-twenty family-thirty family and so on.

Once one of the "families" have all ten numbers on it, that number is the winner and Gracie lines those 10 numbers up in proper numerical order.

She used almost all the numbers before getting all one group filled up, so she had plenty of review. She also didn't become bored because it was just "gamey" enough to keep her interest.