Skip Counting with Movement Game and Language Art Lesson 1, Day 4

8/25/11

Material used:

• Active Arithmetic by Henning Andersen
• The Lower Case Alphabet in Second Grade, Supplement to the book “Sixth Sense Reading and Writing”, By Sofi Mandil (Age 10) & Kristie Burns
• Stockmar stick crayons.
• Stockmar block crayons.
• Main lesson book paper (we used DRAWING PAPER 17.5in x 11.5in)
• Blackboard Chalks

Raphen was cooking tonight, so I spent the time with Kamina outside. First she had a lot of fun being pushed on the swing, then I came up with this idea of a running and clapping game on the trampoline.

Our trampoline has a blue cross on the jumping mat to help the jumper stay in the middle. I stood at one of the four ends of the cross while Kamina ran around the outside edge of the trampoline (just inside of the blue protective cover), which she likes in general almost as much as jumping on the trampoline. She was to count up while she ran, starting with 1 at the end across from me, and 2 when she's next to me while clapping my hand, 3 at the end across from me, and 4 when she's next to me while clapping my hand, and so on. Every time after she clapped my hand, I wrote the number she just said on the ground with sidewalk chalk. One round of game is done when she counts up to 20. What I wrote on the ground are the even numbers from 2 to 20. Kamina had tremendous fun doing this, without realizing that she was in effect practicing skip counting by 2's. This is not the first skip counting game we've played. About a week ago, while we were out on a walk, we played another game that she absolutely loved. She has always loved to walk between me and Raphen holding our hands and having us pull her into the air and swing jump her. When she was obsessed with learning to count down, we had her count down from whatever number she was practicing, and "blast her off" when she counted down to 1. So this time, I slightly modified the "blast off" game. She was to count like normal from 1 onwards, and we "blast her off" on every even number. She loved to be swing jumped so much that we kept at it for a while. Then I bumped it up a notch telling her only to say the blast off numbers out loud. Almost immediately, she was able to do it without making any mistakes counting in 2s till 12 though with some hesitation before saying the larger numbers.

I can't take full credit for inventing these games, as I was mostly inspired by this great book "Active Arithmetic" by Henning Andersen. It describes the use of lively, rhythmic movement as part of the mathematics education. Clapping, stamping, walking, jumping, running and even full body movements are used to engage young children in learning arithmetic. Even though I usually have trouble reading most of the hard core Waldorf books, especially the ones that go way deep into the spiritual side of its philosophy, and are somewhat prejudiced against any other teaching methodologies, I really enjoyed reading this book. It might have something to do with the fact that I came from a rather mathematical background, and finds joy and truth in a lot of the things said in the book. However, I do believe that this sort of active learning is very beneficial to the child, especially a young one, in that they unconsciously learn some of the most fundamental parts of mathematics while enjoying the process. One drawback of the book is that it is written mostly for the classroom setting with a group of children of the usual size of 12 up to 24. As a result, most of the games cannot be directly employed when you only have a small number of children to work with. But so far my success with the little games that I improvised by adapting some of the games or principles described in the book gives me confidence that even with just one child, I can make it not only work but also fun.


After several rounds of the run and clap game, Kamina decided to do some sidewalk chalk drawing. This is the first time I saw her people drawing with distinct ten fingers and ten toes at the end of their limbs, though somewhat frighteningly long. Then she proceeded to write some letters on the ground. You can see her writing the three lower case letters we've been working on. While she wrote those letters, she was also telling herself the letter story for each of them. It's good to know that she's enjoying the letters so much that she's doing it on her own without being prompted, and that the information has been clearly retained.

At our normal job time, Kamina chose to continue the letter job we've been working on in the last few days. Today we focused on the lower case “c” and had a fun time. First, I told the story of “The cloud that cries” from The Lower Case Alphabet in Second Grade by Sofi Mandil (Age 10) & Kristie Burns. It’s a sweet little story about how the little pieces of mists try to comfort a cloud that cries by hugging and kissing him.

As I expected, Kamina rather liked it. Since when she was still a baby, she has always been attracted to stories where people turn from sad to happy. Then I showed her the chalkboard drawing of the story that I prepared earlier. Just like the drawing I had for the Water-Nixie, she absolutely loved it. We read the story together again while looking at the drawing, noting that both cloud and cry start with the happy letter “c”. To visually show this, the cloud in the picture has little “c” all over it, representing the little wisps of mist that are trying to make the cloud happy.

After that, we set out to copy the picture on Kamina’s main lesson page. We divided the paper into two sections, and copied the cloud picture on the left side. On the right side, we wrote “The cloud that cries”. I like the new addition of the colored border that we have this time around the page. With the border, Kamina had less trouble having her crayon sliding off the page and had better control of what she was drawing. She had fun drawing, had a little more trouble writing as we haven’t really practiced most of the letters. She learned to print most of the upper case letters at school, but hasn’t really worked on lower case letters.  So the writing took quite a bit of concentration on her part. At least the method I employed to correct writing mistakes let her stay in good spirit. She likes drawing flowers and butterflies around the letters that she wants to erase, and that reduces the stress over the mistakes. I also let her write upper cases instead of the proper lower cases where she wanted. However, by the end, she was still getting a little vexed, evidenced by the many mistakes she made in “cries”, particularly the letter “s” that she had a lot of trouble with. Hopefully, when we get more practice with running forms in our form drawing endeavor will help. I’m not too worried about it. It’s all that practice is about.