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

Been pondering lately: DD-almost-6 is obsessed with Beast Academy. She is totally not "ready", but she loves the monsters and keeps bugging me to read even though I know she's zoning out on much of the math. But it finally occurred to me -- she IS learning math. Terms are becoming familiar, ideas are making partial sense, and she's easing her way in to understanding.

We take it for granted for most subjects -- language arts, topical knowledge, etc. -- that early immersion and accidental exposure in a rich environment matters. We don't wait for targeted instruction when the child is "ready."

Why not with math? Why do we (collectively, as a culture, not neccessarily parents on this board) withhold it until the day the kid is deemed ready, and then say, "Here are exponents, understand them now or else"?

Oh, and when Beast Academy was covering proto-algebra, DD said "Hey, that's like DragonBox!" and we had to scamper off and play a little DragonBox. I'd been dubious about DragonBox, since it's not really teaching algebra, it's just teaching a set of rules for manipulating. But my opinion of it just shot up. DragonBox is giving them a sense of familiarity and comfort-level and ownership of algebra-world. That can only be a good thing when they start doing algebra for real.

We have quite a lot of incidental maths in our house. I like maths so I don't mind having random conversations about it. A lot of people are uncomfortable with it though.

Your dd may enjoy Hands on Equations

Yes, we are huge fans of math chat and incidental exposure. :-)

We also have a lot of math chat at home, usually kid-driven. One of my favorites was teaching percentages while in the car on the freeway. DS6, then 4, wanted to know how fast I could go without getting a ticket. I told him 10% over the speed limit...I was on a freeway with a speed limit of 60 at the time, and on the way home we were on streets with speed limits of 40, 35 and 30. It was a fantastic exercise and he still "gets" percentages. We saw a sign in front of a Pawn Shop the other day and he commented that TV's were 25% off, so if we need one we should go get it there.

Cooking is a huge source of implicit math in our house. I try to include DS in all our cooking--both for pride in his work and to encourage him to eat more--and the math is a happy incidental.

We are a number family as well. Dd4.5 gets a lot of incidental exposure and it is no surprise that she has a natural ability with numbers. Dh and I think in numbers and find it easier to express ideas using figures and data. Dd has started doing that too. Re: language arts it is a different story. Neither I nor dh are that great with languages (except technical writing). I used to read a lot but not so much anymore, dh does not read for pleasure at all. No wonder dd only started reading after she turned 4 and still does not really enjoy reading.

I think with language and literacy education, people get the holistic nature of it whereas with math, we tend to think of it in term of scope and sequence. A K teacher isn't going to discourage her students from attempting beginning readers if she reads Charlotte's Web to her class but I think there is an unfounded fear that if she tries to expose them to higher math, it could lead to confusion or even worse, a math phobia.

Thought y'all might be interested in this site:

http://www.moebiusnoodles.com/

Bought the book the other day after reading about it in an article on kids doing calculus. It's got some neat activities, but there are things on the site as well.

Ironically, I think the oppposite is true. Kids get a message of "oo, scary, you're not ready for this yet, don't try this at home."

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.