As you can tell, I kind of took the summer off from this blog. There is something about the summer that makes it impossible for me to think about homeschooling.

But summer is nearing its end. The public school starts three weeks from Wednesday. I have to have my homeschooling paperwork in to the state by the end of the month. School is once again on my mind.

This year, I am switching from Saxon Math to Singapore. The kids just were not responding well to Saxon, as much as I liked it. We are going to start in with the new Singapore books this week. They just arrived today.

Another big change this year is that Little E will start kindergarten! He just got his new math book, too, and is very excited. (Singapore Earlybird Kindergarten Mathematics book 2A)

I can’t believe that he is going to be 5 at the end of next week!

I am looking forward to getting back into school. This summer has been very hectic, emotional, and disruptive for all of us and having the sense of normalcy that a school-y schedule will provide us will be a change most welcome.

I also look forward to sharing about our home school life with you here on this blog.

The boys and I have been playing a dice game to practice multiplication facts.

Simply roll two dice and multiply the numbers, write down your score, and add them up at the end.

The kids get practice with single-digit multiplication and adding a column of numbers (we rolled ten times each).

For added practice, we roll one die for a final multiplier. This gives them a problem to work out multiplying a (usually) three-digit number by a one-digit number.

One drawback is that the dice only go up to 6.

One possible solution is to buy dice with more sides. Another is to draw cards, instead of rolling dice.

To help my boys strengthen their multiplication tables, I downloaded a game called Timez Attack. The boys really liked it because it has high-quality graphics that look like a “real” video game.

Another great math resource I found is a website called Math Playground.  It has math games, printable worksheets, manipulatives, and other math resources.

You may already know that PBS has a show that teaches math skills, targeted to children in grades 3-5, called Cyberchase.

But did you know that the PBS website also has math lesson plans designed to correspond to the different episodes of the show?

What a fun way to teach elementary math skills.