I've been lurking here for a couple of weeks, trying to get the lay of the land. I think I'm finally ready to make a comment. Namely: Help!
My DS4.0 has a strong interest in numbers. Except for me and DW, however, he seems to hide this interest from most people. He made it through an entire year of pre-school last year, for instance, without managing to let either of his teachers know that he could add and subtract. They considered him good at math because he could count objects quicker than the other three-year-olds. Lately he has turned his focus to multiplication. I am concerned.
There are two aspects to my concern. First, I want it to seem ok to him that he has this interest in numbers. Another great interest of his is baseball, and he has no problem whatsoever sharing that interest with his teachers and friends. We live in a baseball-obsessed region of the US, and he gets lots of positive feedback for his athletic ability. But he seems already to have learned the lesson that his interest in numbers isn't going to earn him very many social points. Any tricks for dealing with that?
Second, I want to know better how to help him explore his interest in math. Part of the problem is, frankly, that he's barely 4. He doesn't write very well, he doesn't read particularly well (or at least he says he doesn't), and almost all of the math he does goes on in his head. Dinner table conversation consists in out-of-the-blue snippets like, "Daddy, when you were 28 mommy was 23." I have no idea what he's thinking when he says things like that, but he almost always gets them right.
I like that the whole thing happens in his head. It makes it all seem more playful and fun - which I think it is for him. But it's a lot of work to explain things well without writing them down. Most of the skip-count sequences that he knows, for instance, have songs that go along with them. But we had to make up the songs. That's a lot of work. When he asked me how to multiply by 9 recently I resisted, since I couldn't think of a good song to use. And there are lots of other things he doesn't know anything about because I suspect you'd have to write them down to explain them - like carrying and borrowing. It's one thing to play fun math games with my four year old, but it seems like quite another to sit down and actually give him a lesson. Even if he asks. (Does he really want the full explanation?) Isn't that the horrible thing everyone calls hothousing?
Well, you can see I'm ambivalent about this whole thing, and I really don't know how to think about it. Any comments on any of it would be really helpful.
Thanks,
BBdad
