Welcome.
If you are worried about hothousing, then chances are that you are not! If someone saw our DS's room which has a number line from -20 to 100 and a multiplication table posted they'd probably think we're hosthousing too. But it's just one of the boy's interest. He loves numbers and patterns so that's just him! Sounds like you also have a mathy guy that wants to learn.
We started at the dinner table too. Some of the things that we've done:
- I would just write things out on paper to explain it because frankly it is a lot easier to write out some concepts. Later when DS's handwriting got better, he'd also contribute.
- Use block cubes. So many things that you can do with them from place values, to fractions, to multiplication, etc. "So, why do we call three cubed a cube?" Great "hands on"
- Books like G is for Googol, big number book (forget the title), and so on.
- We made up a fingers game where we use sign language (you can sign numbers 1 through 10 on one hand). The idea was that I'd create a number in on hand and a number in the other hand and DS would tell me which was greater. Sounds easy until you add in hand gestures for basic and advanced math operations, negative numbers, etc...
So I think you keep talking to him and answer all the (many!) questions he'll have about math. We kept it all play-based and let DS drive it based on his interest.
Good luck.
JB
