I’m going to mention MEP math here for a moment because they are worth mentioning!

The Centre for Innovation in Mathematics Teaching is located in England. They developed a free, online, high-quality math program. I started it years ago with Skyla and Vika. Then I moved to textbooks when it was too hard for me to be so involved (read, more babies and toddlers), and this year, I’m going back to it.

I’m really impressed with the program.The lessons are brief, scripted even, and have great visuals and manipulatives for kids. It also just intrigues me how they introduce and teach concepts!

Upfront, it’s a lot of printing, and I’m doing a lot of my own printing this year for our schooling (using Ambleside Online). While I was printing out the first lesson batch for the girls I though, hey, let me print out a few lessons to do with Andre (he’s 4yo).

We’ve done 2 days so far, and he’s enjoying it. We’re BOTH enjoying it, and that is important.

On this page, meeting the family, asking questions like How many children?” Who is beside the dog? Who is youngest? … Then counting to 5 on fingers and drawing sticks.

Here, I love this picture. He drew our family. I’m the one with the big head. I like to think,  because I am the largest “presence” in his life 🙂

Here we counted boats, cars, houses. We colored a certain number of them

Here he is working on the bed this morning. Things I’ve learned from this: He is fairly exact– must color in the entire space in the object. He picks up ideas fairly quickly. He has pretty good finger control for his age, too.