If you follow our family website, www.reachingcapetown.com, then you know we recently took in an 8 year old South African girl for a while. She is so lovely and such a joy to have in our home. She has a lot of catching up to do educationally, not only with just learning English but also generally in her subjects. We have enrolled her at a private school in 3rd grade, but this year is mostly about her learning English and just getting comfortable in this school environment. So in the afternoons, I try to do some more focused (and fun) activities to help her more.
She really needs to memorize her addition/subtraction facts. I'm gathering that she needs to just improve her number sense as well as just memorize and practice. She is so smart and loves to learn, so she's an easy student! Today we tried a couple of fun activities. We used the chalk board and magnadoodle to write out problems, just because I think it's fun to write on different surfaces. :) Then we went out on the porch and drew boxes with numbers 1-10 in order in sidewalk chalk. I called out addition and subtraction problems and she had to jump to the square with the answer. It helped her figure it out because she could start on the first number and walk the number of squares to get to the answer. We also tried it with throwing a ball to the answer. Then I took out beans and put the correct number of beans on each numbered square, to match number with quantity. I asked her a couple of problems having her use the beans as counters, to demonstrate to her what actually happens in addition or subtraction.
Later she turned the chalk numbers into hopscotch squares and we and Norah had fun doing that for a while. Gotta love little girls!
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