Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion "Incidental exposure" for math?

Me too! We've been having fun with it (though I think DD is going to age out of it really soon, but that's okay, I'll just donate it to the local homeschooling resource center).

It also reminded me to show DD moebius strips, which she was gratifyingly blown away by.

I'm not mathy, so I forget to talk about it and feel worried that I won't introduce it the "right" way, etc. I don't think most of us worry as much about not reading to kids or talking about language the "right" way.

Honestly, my experience talking about math with my kids is probably much like many elementary school teachers' would be teaching math to bright kids. They ask me questions that I lack the math training and language to answer well. (DD is forever inventing "tricks" and algorithms, some of which work and some of which don't. She reently figured out how to divide fractions before she was taught, by using her knowledge of real-life fractions and checking her work. That was pretty cool. It wasn't exactly the "invert and multiply" rule--she phrased it differently but it turned out to be the same.) They are both somewhat mathy but not extremely so as far as I can tell.

Klein bottles are even more fun that moebius strips.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klein_bottles

Twice the fun!

I completely understand! I am a huge fan of the book "Introductory Calculus for Infants", I realize that most people who have seen it think it is a joke. It's basically an ABC's book, but it gives exposure to the ideas of graphing, formulas, planes, etc. It makes the symbols less scary (plus it's pretty funny to listen to a pre-schooler rattle off the pdf of the normal distribution).

We are a relatively mathematical household, so we have a ton of incidental exposure. But I leave the connections and the logic to my DD since that's really what math is. We also have a few books in the Sir Cumference series which she finds hysterical. I feel at this age exposure to the symbols and the nomenclature of math allows children the ability to overcome that initial fear (Since it does resemble a foreign language). Allowing them the ability to express it in terms of logic and connections and the underlying art form that it actually is.

Awesome!

I'm no slouch at math, but we are definitely more of a wordy family. The number of books I've read to DD5.93 in her life is well into the thousands, and her vocabulary and grammatical sophistication are approaching adult level. (Though with hilarious gaps, because she just hasn't been alive that long.) Comparatively, math is quite neglected.

I'm going to pay a little more attention to bringing math into the realm of family playtime, instead of leaving it in the realm of schoolwork.

You might enjoy You Can Count on Monsters for more incidental exposure.

Oo, we already have that! Time to bring it down off the shelf.

I recently checked out Greg Tang's books from the library. It wasn't a big hit with us but others might like them better.



Completely OT but we had one of those moments with DD last night. She's absorbing a lot from her new BFF at school and suddenly she started saying, "I'm not gonna because I don't wanna." I told her that she is not allowed to talked to us that way and she has to stop using sloppy English. DD then declared "It's not sloppy English! Gonna and wanna are not English words. S (BFF) and I are speaking in a new language."

Sometimes, I'm not so sure about her.