Homeschooling: The Rhythm of a Math Lesson

If there’s one thing common to all new homeschoolers, it’s a feeling of being overwhelmed. One solution is to develop a basic homeschooling rhythm, a daily routine of what you do first, and then next, and then next.

Most new home schoolers try to adopt the rhythm they remember from their own school days, their own classroom experience. But our home is not a classroom, and that pattern can lead to burn-out.

The secret to successful homeschooling is to find a natural rhythm that fits your family. Even in math.

The Traditional Pattern

The traditional math classroom rhythm we remember from childhood is usually some form of “I do, we do, you do.”

We open our textbook to the next lesson, and then:

• We tell the student what to do and how to do it.

• We do a few sample problems together with our child.

• Then we send the kid off to follow these instructions in their homework.

This never worked particularly well in a classroom, as demonstrated by the vast majority of adults who feel some degree of math phobia. But in a homeschool, this formula is almost always a recipe for frustration.

A Creative Pattern for Homeschool Math

We don’t need to (and in fact, we shouldn’t) open a math textbook and read through it with our students from beginning to end, like a novel.

Instead, start with the natural rhythm of learning: notice, wonder, create. We can still use our math textbook, but instead of starting with the lesson as written, we draw out one interesting problem that will puzzle our kids.

• We play with the problem, noticing, observing, discovering everything we can about it.

• We wonder and ask questions, pondering how this problem relates to other things we’ve studied.

• Then we respond to the problem, consolidating our thoughts, creating our own expression of what we’ve learned — a solution, a journal entry, or a new puzzle of our own.

A math lesson may run through this cycle several times with small puzzle problems. Or we might explore one big puzzle, perhaps even spreading it over the course of several days.

Just be careful not to rush those notice-and-wonder stages. That’s where real learning happens.

To Be Continued…

Watch for the next three posts in this series:

• Learning Math with Puzzles
• The Rhythm of Math Puzzles
• The Rhythm of Math Games