- By Carolyn Forte
As math curriculums push advanced concepts at younger and younger ages, parents have become increasingly concerned with their children’s mathematical progress. This tends to result in an increasingly frantic search for just the right math curriculum. Spending several hundreds of dollars on one “great” curriculum complete with manipulatives, videos, etc. after another is not uncommon. At times, after enough trial and error, one will find a program that seems to work fairly well. Often though, parents come to me with junior and even senior high students who struggle with basic math concepts.
The reasons for difficulty vary, but there is a common thread. Children who struggle with math often have little experience with concrete, hands-on, practical, everyday math applications. Examples of these are: constructing things with pencil, paper, ruler, scissors and glue, sewing, knitting, simple carpentry, cooking, model making, gardening, etc. My guess is that parents view such activities as play and thus put little priority on providing these experiences. It is no longer widely understood that young children learn mainly through play and activities that seem playful to them. Older children also learn much faster with playful activities.
Actually, spending the first three or four years of “school” concentrating mainly on such activities is far more productive in the long run for the development of mathematical reasoning than plowing through hundreds of pages of busywork in even the most “hands-on” math curriculum. It’s true that there are many children who thrive on workbooks but even if that is the case, those children still need to develop spatial understanding, geometric logic and hand-eye coordination which seldom if ever comes without experience in hands-on activities.
You can use a math book to give your child some basic practice with paper and pencil calculation but don’t spend more that 15-20 minutes/day on workbooks for primary (grades K-3) unless your child just begs for more. Games and hands-on activities like those mentioned above will provide much faster learning with far more depth of understanding. Board games that use dice, card games and domino games are great for teaching addition and subtraction math facts. There are also games for multiplication/ division facts, measurement, fractions, decimals, percents, graphing, geometry and more.
These tools can cut out many hours of workbook pages and allow your child to move along faster than he would otherwise. However, don’t neglect other hands-on skill building activities like these:
Cooking & Baking: measurement (solid, liquid, temperature, geometry), fractions
Paper Construction: English or metric measurement, geometry, hand-eye coordination, fractions
Sewing: English measurement, fractions, hand-eye coordination, geometry
Knitting: English measurement, counting, intervals, hand-eye coordination
Carpentry: English measurement, geometry, simple physics, hand-eye coordination
Gardening: Measurement, geometry
Of course, your child will also build skills in reading, logic, science and even history from learning and practicing these skills. Best of all, children seldom have to be bribed, brow beaten or otherwise coerced into these types of activities.
For a large selection of games that teach math concepts, go to:
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