Boy, am I glad DS5 can count so I don't have to pay attention to the instructions that sometimes come home as his Kinder homework! (the teacher told us at the curriculum night that if we find some things too basic, we do NOT have to do them. So I'm taking her word for it!)

The worksheets he brings home have instruction along these lines ... "understand that the last number name said tells the number of objects counted. The number of objects is the same regardless of their arrangement or the order in which they are counted."

home activity ... "use a box of blocks or other toys. Have your child count 4 blocks and put them in the box. Have your child move the blocks around and ask if there are still 4 blocks in the box. Ask your child to check by counting. Repeat the activity with 5 blocks."

Seriously? I have no experience with NT kids ... do they actually have to follow all these steps to learn basic counting? Can't they just show them one of the fun Leapfrog videos and be done with it??? I can see why my kid is bored beyond reasonable if that's the kind of math activities they do at school??? The instructions make my head spin! ... and I've already seen even worse than this in the last 2 weeks. Yikes!

When I saw the homework last week (counting 2 and 3 objects) I gave him a different worksheet (with some basic addition to freshen up his old skills) and sent that to school with a note that I hope she doesn't mind I give him more challenging work at times ... with the explanation that I don't want him to start acting up in class if he finds the work too easy. Haven't heard anything back. Not sure if that means she liked the idea or not? Was worth a try

It was shocking to me as well last year. And I can tell you I am equally shocked about the homework so far in first....

One of my dds also learns this way - it doesn't mean she isn't smart, it's just what she needs to conceptualize numbers.

polarbear

I really wish they'd simplify the instructions to basic words so if the kids really need to do all this, they would actually be able to read the instructions themselves (once they learn to read) rather than have someone else read it for them and translate into "normal" language. DS5 doesn't get why he should even think there would be any difference in different arrangements. 5 is FIVE ... what are they talking about??? lol

1111 ... that does NOT give me much hope!

I worked on videotaped developmental psych studies in the 80s; one of them was around kids grasping the idea of transformation based on Piaget's theories. Pouring water from a wide beaker into a tall one would get nt kids up to a certain age to say there was now more water. Same thing with clay, object permanence, counting, etc. I had as hard a time then understanding how a kid could think the amount of water changed, as they did understanding that it didn't change. Some would argue against the value of a child going to school before they entered Piaget's "Conrete Operations" phase.

i remember being boggled by Pre-K math last year for DD. when we got to the teacher conference in november, i remember them telling me they were working on counting to ten. DD was counting everything in sight before she was ONE, so i was legitimately confused. i knew she was early at most things... but i was concerned the teachers must be underestimating the kids: could there really be a class full of school-age kids who had never even thought of counting?

needless to say, the conference did not go well.

I have been a parent volunteer in my child's K class last year - they did all these "moving manipulatives around" to recheck if the numbers remained the same. My son's class was a "gifted" class - but they have to cover all the state mandated curriculum before moving onto challenging stuff. So, most kids would giggle and say words like "baby stuff" and "silly" while doing these activities. But they all did it because it was a fun diversion from coloring, cutting and pasting!
During Halloween last year, the teacher sent home a similar "themed" homework asking parents to do such an exercise with 6 different kinds of candy. I sent in a note that we do not eat candy in our house and hence were going to do a different hands on math activity involving lego blocks at home!

Some kids come hard wired with this concept. If you've only parented one of these kids, it is sometimes startling to encounter a child that's not solid on these concepts.

For kids who dive into math without really grasping this concept, math becomes a series of mysterious steps. I'm glad schools work to teach these concepts, but I do wish they'd do something else for the kids who have had the concept down since their time in the womb.

Maybe I can offer some anecdotal insight.

When I was five, I had a piece of cheese. I ripped it into several pieces and then analyzed my reaction to whether or not the amount of cheese had changed.

I knew that I had the same amount of cheese that I had started with. But I felt like I had more. Why is that? I wondered. I decided that even though the amount of cheese I had was the same, it would take me longer to eat it because I would have to pick up each individual piece. This process would take longer than just picking up the one original piece and taking big bites out of it. The increased time required to eat it made it feel like more cheese. Also, the cheese was now spread out over a larger area, again, making it look like more cheese (in retrospect, to a five-year-old, anyway).

I was satisfied with this explanation, starting eating the cheese, and turned my attention back to Scooby Doo.

I suspect that most kids wouldn't think about this idea on their own or can't make those distinctions at that age. It's very easy to just go with the feeling, especially for a very young child (but adults also do this).

Though...that doesn't excuse the technician in the lab where my friend did a postdoc. When she left for lunch one day, the PI was sitting with him and explaining that diluting his DNA mixture didn't give him more DNA and that he therefore couldn't use the diluted mixture to run more gels. The guy didn't get it. He was apparently fixated on part of the protocol that said use 50 microliters and was ignoring the bit that said of a mixture of concentration x.

When my friend got back from lunch, they were still having the same conversation and the guy still didn't get it.

I have a hard time with that one, myself. I remember studying Piaget and all that with the water and containers, but it's hard to believe it could be the same with blocks. Sure, the water thing is baffling if you look at two differently shaped containers that both hold the same amount of water but look different. But five blocks is five blocks, no matter what you do to them.

We used to send "alternate homework" sheets back to school with DS, in place of the ridiculous things that came home. More than one teacher responded by saying, "sorry, I just hand out the same thing to everyone by habit, didn't mean to give him one of those, carry on", so to speak.

DD, on the other hand, is bright but so easily distracted that it's hard to say what she might do on one of those worksheets -- it varies from one day to the next.

welcome to the world of public kindergarten ;)~

geofizz- I think my DS I "hardwired"!
but seriously, he just seemed to pick it up and know it around age2. same way with reading, it just sort of happened.

However, I know kids who do NEED to be able to touch and move objects around, to make the idea that 4 is 4, and moved around is still 4. whatever works I say.

Just wish schools would make accommodations for the kids who already know #s, letters etc upon entering kinder.

zen- I gave my DS this "test" @age 3, after reading it online somewhere, using the 2 diff sized cylinders, I said we were doing a water "experiment". He "hypothesized" just from looking at empty cylinders it would be same amount of water- "one is short and fat, but this one is tall and skinny. kind of like you and gramma!" he did add something to the effect that it looks like the tall one would hold more but it won't because it is not as fat.

then we did the water and he was quite happy to see he was correct. had he just guess without reasoning- I would have wondered if it were indeed a lucky guess.

sry typos! DS uses my laptop a lot for online gaming, and a lot of my keys are no longer working appropriately- I push them down and they just don't appear. it gets tiring having to go back to add a missed letter.

anyhow, I wanted to add that it is nice that several mentioned that teachers were willing to accept other worksheets from the kids, vs the actual worksheets sent home, it shows th teacher is at least open minded and willing to work with the child as an individual, and that possibly further down the line- more such differentiation might be allowed, and done in class

Aaaand more of the same homework came home today. I'll just have him do the writing part (practicing writing numbers) because his writing is absolutely horrible but the math part, I won't bother. He'll get another one of our home worksheets. Eventually the teacher will say if she likes it or not. Until then, I don't think I really care! I want my kid to LEARN and not be bored.

I just had a little flashback ... DSS now 20 moved in with us when he was 12 and while he was pretty smart and could understand complex ideas, he had serious problems with simple math. He was in 6th grade and had trouble telling me what 2 + 2 was. He REALLY had to think! I don't remember anymore what the categories on his MAP testing were but he would always score in the 85th-95th percentile on all categories, except the one that dealt with the very basics where he'd get scores in the 40s. I guess he was one of those kids who needed the early reinforcement and didn't get it?

But for what it's worth, DS5 is no genius but he got the basic addition and subtraction idea figured out from Vtech video games before he turned 3. Since then he's been suffering through preschool and now Kindy math. We HAVE to make it more fun for him. He used to LOVE math but since he started preschool last year, the love pretty much disappeared

I'm just worried that if I push for something more, the teacher will come back saying DS5 makes mistakes, meaning he hasn't master the topic. I haven't seen any mistakes on his work ... YET ... but knowing him he will start making them because when he does stuff that's too easy, he doesn't pay any attention to it and will just mark "whatever" to be done with it.

I am honestly regretting even sending him to K (though it's just a half day). The only real reason we sent him in was that I desperately need some QUIET (he talks nonstop all the time, no matter what he's doing) AND I need the couple hours alone time for one on one work with DS3 (to work on his anxiety and speech delay).

Val you made me think of my 3 yr old who always want three of something (or three biscuits). If I give her one piece of chocolate she will ask me to break in into three for her. She finds his very pleasing. I think she knows she doesn't really have more, but she's clearly feeling similar things to you with the cheese.

I remember being about 9 (??) And doing a homework sheet or quiz or something with a drawing of an empty glass and being asked to draw a line so it would look half full. So I obviously drew a horizontal line through it. And then a drawing of an empty glass on its side and ditto with making it look half full. I remember so clearly thinking these were so ridiculously easy they must be trick questions and worrying I'd missed the point, and then being shocked that some of my friends drew a vertical line instead of horizontal in the sideways glass...

Reading this makes me feel like I'm peering into a secret, otherworldly school system. I can't imagine DS being able to cope with the types of activities described now, let alone 3 years away.

Aquinas, 5yr olds are generally more reasonable and patient than 2 yr olds but no, I don't think you've got much hope of lock step grade placement working out for your family :-).

Ds4.4 can do that now but he couldn't a year ago. I'm pretty sure he is about as gifted as his hg+ brother.

This got me curious so I tested dd4. I asked her if I gave her some water in a tall big jar and she ours it into 5 smaller cups, will she have more, less or same water. "Same. If you want more water, let it sit for a few days and it will get real dirty and the dirt will make it more." Okay, then I did the exact same experiment and asked her the same question. She hesitated for a second and then replied more water. When I asked her why, she ignored me and started to play with the water making a big mess. Not sure why she didn't get it when presented visually.
Ps. I consider her advanced in math. She taught herself to add and subtract ( including negative numbers), multiply, divide, tell time, count money, and even basic fraction operations like 1/4+1/4=1/2.

Ooh, I genuinely love the real-time data! We should draft an interview guide and present the results of our interviews to MK's teacher as a series of case studies. I'd pay to see her expression, MK!

I remember reading a study (Patricia Kuhl or her husband, I believe) a while back that suggested that children's ability/inability to disconnect height from size was really a question of language. As in, the vernacular "big/small" were used imprecisely to apply to a number of different dimensional changes, so children didn't fully conceptualize that height is a different dimension from total volume, quantity of receptacles, and so forth. Perhaps this is more of a language arts exercise than one in math.

aquinas, I do agree that in many cases it might be a matter of language. ... and I just can't wait for your little one to get to school! lol

My children also struggle with Age when you ask about the biggest/smallest. We asked who was the biggest in the family at dinner last night, my 3yr old said daddy (correct by height and weight, he's 6'7") then changed to her grandma (who is oldest)...

This was in relation to why Daddy starts the meal with more food on his plate than the 3yr old... Greed being the primary lead in to math edcuation in my children's early lives.

(Partial?) homeschool for kindergarten, baby! (That's my unofficial, wildly beyond appropriately premature plan A).

ugh! I just read this thread ... http://giftedissues.davidsongifted.org/BB/ubbthreads.php/topics/166577/3.html and now it all makes sense. It's enVision math that DS5 has in K

We had this problem. My son didn't pay attention when filling out the counting sheets, and then later the "1+1" sheets, and would get the answers wrong because he was rushing through it to be finished. (He apparently made it a game to see how quickly he could finish.) The teacher really thought he hadn't mastered counting or basic addition, although at home he was working on square roots and multiplication. He used to write more difficult problems in the margins - somehow that never made an impression on her, though. Having to complete homework at that level all year really caused problems for my son by the end of the school year. Talk to the teacher asap and see if you can substitute harder worksheets or if she will give him something else. At our school, it couldn't just be ignored - students would be kept in from recess to finish homework that wasn't completed, even in K.

math used to be so much FUN for him and I'm just sad to see how much he regressed in preschool! He's still good at it but before, everything around him was math. Once he was in preschool, it was all about "I don't know this! I haven't learned it at school yet!" I can't imagine keeping him at the snail speed level for another year. I'm slowly testing the teacher to see how much she'll tolerate from me. Once a week I send in our own finished math worksheet that's about end of K / early 1st grade along with the work she sends home and I'm planning on slowly increasing the difficulty and frequency. Hopefully she'll be ok with it.