Summer is here!! The boys are sooo excited to have a break from school and lazy summer days ahead! But they have worked so hard to learn so much this year and I don't want ANY summer learning loss around here so... I have a TON of things planned for this summer to help the boys retain what they have learned. My oldest still has some work to do at memorizing his multiplication and division facts so several of the ideas/crafts I have planned center around fun ways to work on those. When I saw this video I knew I HAD to make some Power Towers. If you have not heard of power towers yet, watch the video in the link above and then hit up Google or Pinterest they are all over the place.
My boys LOVE to build and stack anything so combine making castles/towers with cups AND learning math facts? Sign us up!
The concept with Power Towers is to take something that you want the child to memorize, in this case I used math facts (addition ones - fives) for Brandon and and multiplication for Gabe. You write a problem, sight word... whatever you want the kiddo to memorize on the cup and they have to say the answer or read the word out loud before they can add the cup to their tower/castle.
The concept with Power Towers is to take something that you want the child to memorize, in this case I used math facts (addition ones - fives) for Brandon and and multiplication for Gabe. You write a problem, sight word... whatever you want the kiddo to memorize on the cup and they have to say the answer or read the word out loud before they can add the cup to their tower/castle.
Example:
1s = 1+1, 1+2, 1+3, 1+4, 1+5, 1+6, 1+7, 1+8, 1+9
You
write each of those problems on a separate cup and when they pull the
cup they have to say 1+1=2 etc... and then they get to stack it. If
they can't answer the problem or get the answer wrong that cup goes in the "can't answer stack" and they can
try those again after they have gone through the whole stack. The point
is to go through them QUICKLY and have FUN, be SILLY, be LOUD and
LEARN!
Remember... If they get the word/fact wrong they have to add those cups to a different pile to try again at the end, they can't add it to the tower UNTIL they have it RIGHT AND if it FALLS down they have to start all over again.
I thought the addition facts would keep him
busy for a while... NOPE! he stacked these up in record time, went
right through them ALL on the first pass! I have to make another
container with the 6-10 facts for both the addition and multiplication
and then I want to make subtraction for Brandon and division for Gabe. I
have a feeling Brandon will be moving on to the multiplication towers
before the summer is out!
The video in the link I provided above, and other blogs I have
seen these on recommend reusing old Pringles containers, while I LOVE
reusing things I have put my foot down about buying the frankenfood known as Pringles. I found these nifty wine bottle gift boxes at Michael's for 2.98 which
is not much more than a can of Pringles would have been and I don't have
to feed my kids that crap to get the containers. Plus I'm totally
diggin' the animal print on them :) I got the cups at the Dollar Store and they were 32 in a pack for $1. The wine boxes hold exactly enough of the cups to hold 1/2 of a set. So 1-5 of addition facts and then I'll make another container with the 6-10 addition facts.
 | ||||
| They decided to get crazy with the extra cups for the sets I still need to make. Their goal was to build a tower tall enough to touch the chandelier! It took them a while and it fell down a few times but they did it! Little sis had her own stack for building with too :) I think I might put ABCs and 123s on a set for her to memorize. |
Here are some more AWESOME math games that I hope to try to play/learn with the boys over the summer some of them I would need to make some adjustments to to bring the math down to my guys levels but I think that should be easy enough.
Do you have any summer learning planned? If so I would love to hear about it.
No comments:
Post a Comment