Math Triumph

The kids are in a nice space lately. A is so enjoying all of her activities these days, and spent the car ride to chess club today thinking up historic events she wanted to memorize the dates of. She said "My favorite subject is history, but I also love writing and math and geography. The only thing I'm not that interested in is science, and even that is pretty interesting sometimes." She loves math!!! 

We've been going really slowly in math lately. It only took us 2-3 months to get through _Life of Fred: Fractions_, but _Life of Fred: Decimals and Percents_ has been quite a bit more challenging. We made it through the first 12 or so chapters when I realized that we had gone too fast. We started over, and again started to bog down, this time around chapter 15 or so. 

The chapters are short, and end with 5-8 problems that go over the concepts covered in that chapter and review one or two concepts from previous chapters or from the fractions book. Then, every fifth chapter there is a "bridge" of 10 problems covering everything that has been introduced so far, and you have to get 9 out of 10 correct before moving on to the next chapter. You get five tries to cross each bridge--i.e., there are 5 different sets of problems--and as soon as you get 9 out of 10 on a set you move on to the next chapter. A had a hard time passing the previous bridge and was really not enjoying math at all. 

Once she finally passed that bridge, we mostly set _Life of Fred_ aside and did a variety of stuff for math. She worked on Singapore's _Challenging Word Problems_,  math puzzles I found on the internet, and the Building Thinking Skills_ Figural workbook. Plus, we did a bit of pool (as in billiards) geometry and a fair amount of "trampoline math," where I threw random math problems at her while she was jumping on the trampoline. I did a mixture in multiplication and division facts; formulae for area and perimeter of a circle, rectangle, and triangle; conversion of decimals to fractions; conversion of decimals to percents; and multiplication and division of decimals by powers of 10. We did these for about 2 months, along with the next 5 chapters of Fred: decimals. Then it was time for another bridge. Which she was dreading. But which she passed! Yesterday we did a very triumphant victory lap, a.k.a. Chapter 26.