In our Waldorf inspired homeschool, we start off our year with our main lesson blocks in Math or Grammar. This year we are working on the times table primarily and since we want to take the year to master it (though it will likely take longer realistically), we are starting those lessons right from the start. For this unit, I've drawn a large multiplication table on the chalkboard and made it colorful for the sake of beauty and practicality. It's my hope that my 9-year-old daughter will be able to use the table to help with math and quickly identify answers by following up or across the board with ease because of the colors. I also hope that the colors will help with skip counting and memory, but in my experience, the one thing that helps best with memorizing the times table is rhythmic clapping, skip counting and singing the times table. If each of the 12 times has a different chant or rhythm or song, that helps tremendously.

Today's chalk drawing was inspired by two posts on Instagram. The first is Della at The Beauty of Play and the other is by Steiner Teacher. Both posts had either number charts or times tables drawn in beautiful colors. When you color math this way, you honor the beauty that is intrinsic in math and you invite the students to partake in that beauty as well.

When the chalk drawing was complete, I added some of the games and books we will use throughout this unit. Putting them out and within easy grasp is also an invitation, and the fact that I color coded them too, was simply an addition on my part.

For more on the Waldorf way of teaching math, check out the blog post that accompanies this video
https://www.pepperandpine.com/waldorf...

For this chalk drawing, I used Sargent Art Square Chalk pastels from Blick Art Materials. My chalkboard is by Ghent and it is 4'x6'. It used to be a mobile chalkboard on wheels and the chalkboard is double sided with the reverse as a dry erase board, but a few years ago, I decided to mount it on the wall and add more bookshelves below to house our growing collection of books.

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