Fun With Mazes

It's so exciting to see Reese gravitate towards certain types of activities...it's pretty telling about how his brain works.  So two years ago, when he received a Kumon Maze Book as a birthday gift, I loved watching him tear into it & work away at solving the puzzles.

The Kumon maze books started simple, & worked towards more complicated solutions.  One of my favorite things about Kumon workbooks is the paper quality!  Nice, thick paper & colorful designs make them very appealing.  Reese would ask daily to do a maze as part of our school work, & I happily obliged!

After we finished a handful of Kumon books, I wanted something a little more challenging, & I came across The Everything Kids' Mazes Book.  Visually, it's a little busier than Kumon books, but I really liked the variety of puzzle problems.  Hidden pictures, geometric mazes, multiple-starting-point mazes...all sorts of great stuff!

One of the very best parts about The Everything Kids' Mazes Book, though, is that for each maze, there is a theme.  Terrific Turtles.  Sweet Trees.  Sacred Cats.  Flying Fish.  Each maze has a paragraph with information relating to the topic.  For example, Flying Fish tells all about actual fish that can "fly" out of the water (we've seen these on cruises...really neat!).  So not only will your child work on logical thinking skills, you can sneak in some reading practice & science study as well! 

Incorporating different types of thinking activities is important...I want Reese to be as strong as possible in all sorts of thought processes.  By adding mazes to our day, it's been a fun way to develop problem solving!

Subject: Math

One of my biggest challenges in homeschool is MATH!  I had to work really hard in school growing up to make math "click", and even though I did well, taking the SAT & ACT showed that Math is definitely not my strong suit. 

As Reese gets older, we will most likely turn to other sources for teaching advanced math...because, let's face it... I'm going to make a muddled mess of the whole thing. 

But...I can handle 4th grade math :)  And I have found a way to throw in some supplemental activities to challenge Reese & develop his logical thinking skills.

Mindware puts out a fantastic line of activity books (they call them Puzzle Books) that use all sorts of different thinking skills.  I started using them last year & it was one of Reese's favorite parts of our day.  We'd do just 1 puzzle each day as part of our Math & it's fantastic to see how well he is starting to think like a little mathematician.

Last year, we started with Analogy Challenges Level A, Perplexors Basic Level, & Venn Perplexors Level A.  Each one used a different type of logic pattern, but by the end of each book Reese really had a good grasp on how to think through the challenge. 

We will continue this year with Logic Links Level B (this one is really hard for me!), Venn Perplexors Level B, Math Perplexors Level A, & Perplexors Level A.

My hope is that by introducing these types of problems early on, he will easily think that way when it comes up in the future.  By solving just one problem in a book each day, we'll work through the 4 books above by the end of the year. 

If you're looking for a quick, fun little addition to your child's Math studies, you might want to look into the Mindware series of books!