posted by Jessica Lynette on School

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It excites me greatly when I discover something the boys can do to encourage their passion for learning. One of my goals as home educator is to preserve, and even drive deeper, their love for learning.

While reading An Easy Start in Arithmetic (Grades K-3) by Ruth Beechick I was inspired by the simplicity in teaching arithmetic to children by using real life situations rather than work sheets. It’s a simple read and an excellent one if you have young children to teach.

One of my boys favorite things is gum (which, if you recall, I took advantage of their love for it and used it as our Christmas advent calendar!) Due to a fantastic sale on gum we have an abundance of it right now and I was inspired to pull out a few packages of it, give the huge pile of it to the boys, and ask them to create ten piles of ten to see if we had 100 pieces of gum. It was fabulous practice for them in counting to 100.

I promised them that if there were more than 100 pieces they could each have a piece {knowing full well there would be extra!} and they eagerly jumped into their task of counting out ten piles of ten, carefully measuring their progress with an abacus.

Day two of counting to 100 brought a new level of enthusiasm as they ran to me several times to share their discoveries;

“Hey! Did you know if I count out 5 I only need to count 5 more to get to 10?”
“Wow! And if I count to 6 I only need 4 more to get to 10!”

My mama heart was happy. They were counting to 100. And were excited about what they were discovering along the way.

Tags: children, school