Reviewing Multiplication.com

I recently discovered a new educational tool for multiplication and am excited to tell you all about it. I love how it was set up to teach memorization of the multiplication table through the different learning styles.

After spending a little while exploring the program /www.multiplication.com myself, I called my 7-year old daughter over to give it a test run. She spent about 30 minutes interacting with the program.

 

The program begins by picking a set from the multiplication table that you would like to learn. My daughter chose 2×6, 3×5 and 4×3.  Each number was assigned a picture, two, for example, was a shoe and six was chicks. Then a silly story was played about a shoe and a chick being an elf. Through the story, visualizations and hands-on activity my daughter soon memorized the concept that 2×6=12.

I believe that understanding principles of math, how things work together, is more important than straight memorization. So I was delighted when I discovered this program includes a demonstration of how we reach our solutions than games to re-enforce the solutions she had memorized.

The program offers a few of the lessons for free and also worksheets, color pages and activities you can do off the computer to cement in the concepts.

We have decided to keep this in our curriculum for our multiplication section and though we are currently going to use the free version on a trial basis, I hope we will advance to the premium membership soon.

Let me know if you enjoyed this review. I would love to know what you would like to hear about! Comment below and I will see what I can do.

Cakes from Birthday Pasts

 

Birthday Cakes!

This is a list of Birthday Cake ideas. I have made everything from simple fire truck cakes to more elaborate Noahs Ark Rainbow cakes to a one-of-a-kind Swimming Clifford cake. I hope you are inspired to do something fabulous.

This is a Pink and Purple ladybug cake. It was one of the first and last that I ever did in full fondant. We concluded as a family that we didn’t care for the taste of that much fondant. After this cake I only made cake Toppers.

Cake toppers like this little one. She was my attempt at Angelina Ballerina. She was one of my first cake topper experiments and we ended up forgetting to put her on the cake. oops.

If you are going to have a unicorn than there should be rainbow cake.

 

This is another rainbow cake I did. My Crying Elephant cake was done in honor of the 5k sponsored by The Bronx Zoo. I made the cake as a fundraiser for the event.

This was an Elsa inspired frozen castle cake.

My daughters’ firetruck birthday. I didn’t have time to bake a cake. I bought a cake and put a new firetruck on top. Things don’t always have to be from scratch, nor made by hand. She loved the cake and it was really fun!

and the last one I am going to post on here today: worm cupcakes. yum. These were work and included both gelatin and straws.  I have only ever done these once but they were fun to play with and eat.

 

 

First blog post <– EVER

I’ve done it.

 

I have finally created my own blog. I am knawing at the tips of my fingers between typing words, wondering how this adventure is going to go. I will keep this brief.

I have three purposes for this blog:

I want to help women find freedom in motherhood and life in general.

I want to share some things that I enjoy doing; this will include some of the cakes I’ve made, some crafting ideas, and some recipes.

I want to share some things that I am doing within the homeschooling world.

 

I’m learning and growing in each of these areas. I would love it if you join me!