Freebies

Skip Counting and Knitting

Devona 0 Comments

I love creating my own knitting patterns based off of nothing but the basic guidelines for pattern making. For example, creating a top down mitten which has a standard thumb gusset knitted later with provisional stitches. You don’t really need a pattern for this. knitting-mittenYou just need to know how these pieces are structured, and then you need to decide a multiple of stitches to work in. I usually work in multiples of 3s, 4s or 5s. Once you know what your multiples of stitches are you can add cables, fair aisle patterns, simple lace, just by doing a repeated pattern which fits in the multiples you are working with. So if I’m making a mitten and the gauge requires that I cast on 15 stitches to start, I will likely end up with a multiple of 5 or 3 when I finish my increases so I would choose to do my ribbing for the cuff either with “K2 P1” pattern, or “K5 P5” depending on how stretchy I want the cuff to be.  This mitten pictured ended up having a “K1 P1” cuff. I think I cast on 12 to start.

Why am I telling you this?

Because I homeschool math learners, and this is the most typical math I use as a creative person. It’s the knitters equivalent to making change when you work in retail. You begin to know which stitch patterns to use just as quickly as a cashier can make change from $50 for a bill of $42.67.

This natural math-i-ness inspired my next freebie worksheet for homeschoolers. My first grader and I are doing a very relaxed “Five-in-a-row” style curriculum this year, and we’re working from Jan Brett’s book, The Mitten. Since we’re also working on skip counting by 2s, 5s and 10s, I made this simple knitting skip counting worksheet. I hope that you give it a try. It would really work for anyone from 1st to 3rd grade depending on how strong their multiplication skills are. Ours are nonexistent over here so this seems like a good place to start.

knitting-skip-count-worksheet

Feel free to download and use for your personal lessons. Please link back to the original post if you do share it! If you use this with your kids let me know how it goes. I might make some more knitting worksheets in the future for pattern making and geometry. Knitting is such a great reason to do math I just can’t help myself!

Politics and Homeschool

Devona 0 Comments

Our kids have been very interested in the political events of late. I bet yours are, too. We spend so much time talking about the debates and issues in the mornings, in the car, before bed, that I decided to switch gears in our school curriculum for the next few weeks.

Normally we use the Build Your Library curriculum as our core and supplement science with group classes. Build Your Library (BYL) is a literature-based, history rich curriculum which uses Story of the World as its spine and much historical fiction for the literature. It’s Charlotte Mason inspired, so mostly learning through experience. I add in map work and documentaries to make it work for our kids. But as our interest is moving towards American politics, I am planning to skip most of our BYL work except the Story of the World readings and our timeline, to make room for a cool Presidential Elections Unit Study I found on Oklahoma Homeschool.

The first week of the study has the kids do research on voting rights around the world on the CIA website. It’s a really cool idea but there was no direction to the research. When my kids are given an assignment like that they mostly just look at me and say, “What am I supposed to be doing?” So, I made them this CIA Voting Rights Factbook Scavenger Hunt to get them going. They loved it so much that I’d like to share it with you. Feel free to download it, and even share the link to this page. Let me know if your kids use it and what you think. I’m planning on making more of these scavenger hunts, so look for more later.

CIA Voting Rights Factsheet Scavenger Hunt