Patterning and finger-math can enhance your child's math skills!
Enhance your child's math skills with the ancient finger-math method. Did you know that the abacus developed from the practice of ancient finger-math? Usually teachers discourage students from counting on their fingers, but this is very different. Like an abacus, the right hand represents the ones place and the left hand represents the tens place.
There is a wonderful book, The Complete Book of Fingermath by Edwin M. Lieberthal (1983), that shows parents and children how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide very quickly with their fingers.
Finger-math works for any age group, from preschool to high school and is very effective. Patterns, spatial relationships and time are the foundations of understanding math. Fingermath helps to build such numerical patterns and relationships in the mind, so that what’s on paper makes more sense, quicker. http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Fingermath-Simple-Accurate-Scientific/dp/0070376808/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1249156659&sr=8-1.
Any child can become more gifted in math by learning the finger-math method. Purposeful parents would do well to give it a try as early as possible. They should also use every opportunity possible to help their children make patterns and sort things.
Counting money supports number patterning, too. A website with free printable math worksheets is www.edhelper.com.
Once a child has a good grasp of number values, addition, and subtraction, it’s not too early to introduce the idea of a number line that goes from negative numbers to positive numbers.
Children can understand the idea of digging holes (negative numbers versus building mounds (positive numbers) with a number line. Or use the idea of being in debt versus having money. I like to use a number line to show what happens if we have 4 but subtract (take away) 6. Our 4 mounds turn into 2 holes! Or 4 - 6 = -2. Or we have 4 dollars but we owe someone 6 dollars, so we still owe him 2 dollars. We have negative money.
Early math the right way, just like early reading the right way - The Godfrey Method!
http://thegodfreymethod.com
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