A Good Foundation - Early math the right way
An early math skills foundation is almost as important as early reading. It’s definitely the runner-up in priority. The maths and sciences increase our ability to think of various possibilities to solve problems in all areas of life. And the foundation of maths and sciences is good reading ability.
The best way to develop a mathematical mind is with patterning. Helping a child see patterns in the world around her is the first step in understanding spatial and time relationships, very important to math reasoning.
And the best way to ensure that your child can develop to his/her full potential is to start early to provide fun learning experiences. Here are some ideas for creating a child’s stimulating environment.
- An easy way to do this is to have your preschooler sort the silverware from the dishwasher, as discussed below.
- Making repeating patterns with building blocks or colored paper, paint, or crayons are also good ways to develop patterning ability.
- As a parent, you can limit the mess without limiting your child's need to explore by providing bottom drawers in the kitchen full of accessible stuff to play with. Clear, plastic tubs can work, too. Children usually prefer real-life things over toys, and can tell the difference.
- Let your child help you sort silverware from the dishwasher, which is also good for her math and reading brain development. Place clean silverware onto a clean table, and have your child sort piles of forks, spoons, and butter knives (no sharp knives), as well as small and large spoons, etc. Then he can help put them into the proper slots in the drawer.
- Have play-crawling time, even with older children. Those who crawl more often do better in math and reading, as the Montessori schools found out years ago. Having play time to chase each other while crawling around the house is a great way to link the physical body's spatial and timing relationships with the brain through hand-eye-leg coordination, thus increasing learning capability.
- It's a good idea for parents to allow these kinds of play time at least once a week, if not every day. Children who learn spatial relations and patterns in the world around them usually do much better with the academics of reading, math, and science, as well as the artistic talents. Spatial and time relationships are intricately linked with our brain's ability to understand the patterns of numbers, phonics, and words.
- Besides patterning, a child needs to learn what numbers mean, such as the proper amount of dots next to each number. Playing non-gambling games with dice is a good way to start.
- With youngsters, I also play ‘Go Fish’ with playing cards, which have the number and its amount of hearts (spades, diamonds, or clubs) on each card. Rook cards and Uno cards don’t do this.
- When learning addition and subtraction, I also show my kids a number line that goes into infinity in the positive direction (shown with an arrow), and into infinity in the negative direction (shown with an arrow in the opposite direction), starting in the middle at zero, going both ways, to the right and to the left. It starts to prepare their minds for the idea of negative numbers, like being in debt. Or like digging holes versus building mounds.
- Playing with money and money values are also great games for math development.
- Calendars are another way to teach math skills, believe it or not. Besides learning the months, children learn the repeating patterns of days, weeks, months, and years. I always make my year-long, learning-calendars in a circle for maximum patterning. See the example below.
A circle calendar looks like a pie, and it’s easier to show a half-year, quarter-year, and the continuous nature going from December to January of the next year. It also shows which months are exactly six months apart, which is handy and very visual. In this way, my calendar is introducing simple geometry ideas, too.
Pictures taken from http://www.abcteach.com/directory/teaching_extras/calendars
Months of the Year Calendar
It’s also possible to show the continuity of days in a week shaped as a circle. See figure below.
Pictures taken from TGM books: "A Funny Boy Was Prince River", "A Sunny Kid Was Prince River", and "A Pretty Girl Was Alpha Bette".
Days of the Week Calendar
(Just for fun:)
Monday's child is fair of face,
Tuesday's child is full of grace,
Wednesday's child is full of woe,
Thursday's child has far to go,
Friday's child is loving and giving,
Saturday's child works hard for a living,
But the child who is born on the Sabbath Day
Is bonny, blithe, good, and happy.†
†[I. Opie and P. Opie, The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951, 2nd edn., 1997), pp. 309-10.]
Give your children every possible advantage to be their very best selves by exposing them to many wholesome experiences and, without excessive pressure, motivating them to achieve. There are many different types of intelligence that deserve recognition and expression.
More about learning math the right way is discussed in Volume 10 of It's Not Rocket Surgery!
Without these preventatives, the cracks in your child may be math incompetency, low self-esteem, caught in the downward educational trend, lower IQ, slower learning capacity, and/or poor decision-making skills. You are the key. It’s not rocket surgery!
http://thegodfreymethod.com/blog/good-foundation-11-ideas-early-math-right-way
No comments:
Post a Comment