I’ve posted before on my creative approach to math this year for my 6 year-old son, Dominic, who isn’t a good fit yet for most traditional curricula, including math.  This year I’ve put together a very hands-on creative math curriculum for him.  We play a lot of math games and use math manipulatives. 

In the past few months, he’s been eager to learn to write his numbers and he has a good understanding of the concept of addition and subtraction, but for the remainder of the school year I will keep his math curriculum pretty light.

Each week we have a “number of the week” and it’s a big hit with my boy.  Dominic keeps a special book in which he writes the number of the week and illustrates the number with a corresponding number of one object.  So if the number of the week is 2, he would make a big “2” and illustrate the number with 2 balls or 2 snakes — anything he wants.

This week our number was “7”.  We discussed the significance of this number: there are 7 days of the week, 7 colors in a rainbow, and God rested on the 7th day of the Creation Story.  We made rainbow coloring sticks this week:  just a dowel with strips of crepe paper stapled together then taped onto the end of the stick.  All 3 of the younger children have been playing with these sticks all week — twirling them, running with them, making dazzling circles and patterns in the air.  Ya know, I couldn’t resist myself. 🙂

Great fun and super cheap!