katfrog

So how do you encourage or support your children in acquiring math skills? Cooking is a no brainer, what else?

Kat

Joyce Fetteroll

On May 20, 2012, at 5:49 PM, katfrog wrote:

> So how do you encourage or support your children in acquiring math skills?


Rather than being concerned about how to get nutrients into a plant, focus on the soil, water, air and sun around the roots. The plants will take in what they need.

Same with kids. Don't focus on the kids. Focus on the environment they're pulling what interests them from.

Think of math not as arithmetic and formulas. Think of it as a way to get information you want from the world.

Be interested in pulling information you need from the world yourself :-)

Video games are awesome. (Though don't worry if a child doesn't care about them.)

Legos.

Any kind of games. Board games. Card games. Computer games. Apps.

Allowance.

Measuring things. Ask them to get two pounds of apples at the store. A chunk of cheese that's more than half a pound but less than three quarters. (Help them as much as they need. The more important thing is that everything be and remain fun.)

Sorting things.

Growing a garden.

When they ask a how long or how much question, solve it out loud as you're going through it in your head. (Unless that irritates them.)

Ask if anyone wants to figure out the tip. Treat it as a game, a fun thing to do, rather than a necessary way for them to learn math.

Have you seen Sandra Dodd's math page?
http://sandradodd.com/math/

If you find anything on that page you want to share with your kids, do it because you find it fun, not because it's math :-)

Joyce



[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

BRIAN POLIKOWSKY

Can you elaborate. What kind of math skills? Math you use everyday by just living life?
Like counting money or knowing how many days are left in the month?
Or are you talking about math you see in school?


I have never had to encourage my children. Math is everywhere.

My 6 year old's Gigi has a  horse riding instructor that  is a 6th grade teacher and she says Gigi knows more math than 
 most her students. Why? 
Because she is learning in real life and she is understanding how numbers really works.

Gigi asks all the time about numbers, hours, days. She is always adding numbers, subtracting and asking questions about it.
She wants to make sense of it.

My son learned mostly by playing video games. So much math! 


Read some here:

http://sandradodd.com/math/%c2%a0

Alex Polikowsky

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Meredith

In addition to what Joyce said, "math" is about patterns - all kinds of patterns including shapes, music, even social interactions make a kind of pattern. Logic and deductive reasoning are aspects of mathematics. Anything that might be called "science" - from the periodic table of elements, to alternating leaves on a plant, to the way the different cloud shapes can be used to predict the weather all have a mathematical component.

Just as humans are wired to learn language, we're wired to learn mathematics. Kids can't Help noticing patterns and thinking about them. Notice patterns with them, all kinds of patterns. Don't make it a lesson, instead share your own fascination and wonder with the patterns of life with your kids and allow their fascination and wonder to inspire yours.

The nuts and bolts of written equations are picked up pretty quickly by kids who've had lots of time to play with the concepts in normal life.

---Meredith

Debra Rossing

> The nuts and bolts of written equations are picked up pretty quickly by kids who've had lots of time to play with the concepts in normal life.

This brought to mind a sweet memory from years ago. DS (now just shy of 14) has never been schooled. Back when he was around maybe 6 or 7, we painted a huge chalkboard on side of the dining room area (it's a country kitchen so we spend a lot of time there). Not too long after, it was holiday time and we had a houseful of in-laws. The kids (and grownups too) were having fun playing with 'writing on the wall' - we had all different colors of chalk to have fun with. SIL's step-DD, who was about 11 or 12 at the time, wrote a series of 'math worksheet' type questions for DS - the 1+3=(blank) and 2+(blank)=5 type things. Next time he popped by, he looked at it, filled in all the blanks, bopped back to other things. She looked at it, noted all the answers were 'correct' and was puzzled as to how he could get them all correct when he'd never done a worksheet or taken a quiz or anything. For him, it was a game/puzzle; for her, it was 'school'.

Even earlier than that, we were in the car and I handed DS 3 cookies. He said "I need 4 cookies please". I turned and said "how did you eat those 3 I gave you so fast?" He said "I didn't but I want 7 so I need 4 more." It wasn't a lesson, it was just part of living a life full of cookies.

He's also spent time fascinated by pi (we celebrate the annual Pi Day - this year I made a pi cake - a sheet cake sculpted to look like pi!) and E=mc^2 because they showed up in various TV programs (like Jimmy Neutron). Plus, he helps us with everyday stuff from planting the garden to building the raised beds, to helping with groceries. We've discussed rounding and approximating at the grocery store. He used to love rattling off long strings of adding and subtracting and such for me to calculate as a game when we were in the car. It amazed him how I could manage (most of) it in my head so I verbalized how I handled things (BTW basic arithmetic is, IMO, taught backwards - think about how you calculate in your head then compare that to how you'd do the same thing on paper - different usually. Most likely, on paper, you calculate from right to left. But, in one's head the calculations are usually from left to right - clumping the 100s together then setting that aside, calculating the tens, combining that with the 100s and setting it aside, then calculating the ones and combining that with the other total. Not as much 'carrying' and overhead involved).

Deb R



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Judy Negrey

Thanks Debbie for the reminder about Math and the ease at which daily life
incorporates it. We have a 6 yr old and I have wondered when I tell her to
see it in her head (when we are out and about) how she sees it differently
from paper.
Mama Judy

lalow

A while back a friend let us borrow a book called the Life of Fred. They are math books in a story format. The kids like the stories cause they are funny and engaging. My then 6 year old was listening and Iwas reading a chapter about sets. The story went into somewhat tedious detail about sets and cardinality of sets and something called aleph null. I really didnt totoally understand it all and figured perhaps I should just skip that whole part, when my son says, " so aleph null is an infinite number". The book had not yet used the term inifinite. But the next sentence let me know he was right.





--- In [email protected], Debra Rossing <debra.rossing@...> wrote:
>
> > The nuts and bolts of written equations are picked up pretty quickly by kids who've had lots of time to play with the concepts in normal life.
>
> This brought to mind a sweet memory from years ago. DS (now just shy of 14) has never been schooled. Back when he was around maybe 6 or 7, we painted a huge chalkboard on side of the dining room area (it's a country kitchen so we spend a lot of time there). Not too long after, it was holiday time and we had a houseful of in-laws. The kids (and grownups too) were having fun playing with 'writing on the wall' - we had all different colors of chalk to have fun with. SIL's step-DD, who was about 11 or 12 at the time, wrote a series of 'math worksheet' type questions for DS - the 1+3=(blank) and 2+(blank)=5 type things. Next time he popped by, he looked at it, filled in all the blanks, bopped back to other things. She looked at it, noted all the answers were 'correct' and was puzzled as to how he could get them all correct when he'd never done a worksheet or taken a quiz or anything. For him, it was a game/puzzle; for her, it was 'school'.
>
> Even earlier than that, we were in the car and I handed DS 3 cookies. He said "I need 4 cookies please". I turned and said "how did you eat those 3 I gave you so fast?" He said "I didn't but I want 7 so I need 4 more." It wasn't a lesson, it was just part of living a life full of cookies.
>
> He's also spent time fascinated by pi (we celebrate the annual Pi Day - this year I made a pi cake - a sheet cake sculpted to look like pi!) and E=mc^2 because they showed up in various TV programs (like Jimmy Neutron). Plus, he helps us with everyday stuff from planting the garden to building the raised beds, to helping with groceries. We've discussed rounding and approximating at the grocery store. He used to love rattling off long strings of adding and subtracting and such for me to calculate as a game when we were in the car. It amazed him how I could manage (most of) it in my head so I verbalized how I handled things (BTW basic arithmetic is, IMO, taught backwards - think about how you calculate in your head then compare that to how you'd do the same thing on paper - different usually. Most likely, on paper, you calculate from right to left. But, in one's head the calculations are usually from left to right - clumping the 100s together then setting that aside, calculating the tens, combining that with the 100s and setting it aside, then calculating the ones and combining that with the other total. Not as much 'carrying' and overhead involved).
>
> Deb R
>
>
>
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Melissa And Bryon

My ten year old really enjoys reading the Life of Fred books. She says they are so funny. We just ordered two more in the elementary series for her.

~Melissa~
Sent from my iPhone

Please become an organ donor and give the gift of life.

>>>

A while back a friend let us borrow a book called the Life of Fred. They are math books in a story format. The kids like the stories cause they are funny and engaging. My then 6 year old was listening and Iwas reading a chapter about sets. The story went into somewhat tedious detail about sets and cardinality of sets and something called aleph null. I really didnt totoally understand it all and figured perhaps I should just skip that whole part, when my son says, " so aleph null is an infinite number". The book had not yet used the term inifinite. But the next sentence let me know he was right. <<<

Debra Rossing

Another fun 'math related' book series is the Sir Cumference series related to geometric concepts like circumference, pi, diameter, etc.

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Catherine GB

Hi
I tried to find the books on amazon, but couldn't. Could you tell me the
name of the writer or the publisher, please ? BTW, I am in the UK...
Thank you !
Cat