Summer Math Practice

My 7yo son loves video games. He really is a child of the 21st century with excellent computer skills. Oh well. Somehow, someway these things might serve him well. The thing is, we don't have any kind of video game equipment at all. No Gameboy. No X-Box. No Wii. No nothing. I have no plans to change that situation any time in the near future. We do have two laptops - one for mom and dad, one for homeschool (which we actually all use). So he likes to play various online games on lego.com , pbskids.org and playmobil.com. I usually allow him a little time to play some online games each day, after school and chores are done for the day. So, here's the deal we've made for the summer months. If he wants computer time, he has to start it with math practice. We're using Arcademic Skill Builders this summer. It is marked as a favorite on his school laptop. When he wants computer time, he starts by going to this site. I set the oven timer and he has to play math games on this site for 15 minutes. He really likes the games on this site and it gives him some good arithmetic practice. He seems to grasp abstract math concepts really well, but still needs a lot of work on the pure memorization of facts. This is really giving him the daily practice he needs and he never argues about it. He actually begs to play. After he has his 15 minutes of math, he gets 20 minutes to play something else. It's working so far, and I'm hoping to see lots of good improvement in his arithmetic skills by August!

Belief

This post is from 3/13/08

On Tuesday, dad stayed home with 6yo while I was taking one of my PhD comprehensive exams. They worked on some of 6yo's schoolwork that day. They were working on a pretty hard math problem that was an algebraic word problem - pretty challenging for a 1st grader. So dad was egging him on with some reverse psychology. Anyway, here's the dialogue that they told me about afterwards.

Dad: You can't do that problem!
6yo: Yes I can!
Dad: Well, I'll believe it when I see it!
6yo: "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe!"

Then he proceeded to do the problem correctly.