I have a new podcast interview, and I think you’ll enjoy it!
Check out Cindy Rollins’s The New Mason Jar (Season 7, Episode 93) on your favorite podcast app, or listen on the website:
Here’s a couple of excerpts…
The Foundation of Mathematics
More than anything else, Mason wanted her students to discover in math a sense of immutable truth, a truth that stands on its own, apart from anything we say or do, a truth we can explore and reason about but can never change.
This sense of Rightness, of solid, unalterable truth, inspires a feeling of wonder and awe –– she calls it “sursum corda,” a call to worship –– that delights our minds. It’s that “Aha!” feeling we get when something we’ve been struggling with suddenly fits together and makes sense.
A Practical Tip: Narration
According to Charlotte’s Principle 14, knowledge is not assimilated until it is reproduced.
We need to get narration in our math lessons. Children learn when they wrestle with ideas and put their thoughts into words. That means we need to take our focus off the answers to math homework problems, and instead focus on the reasoning behind those answers.
Thinking, sense-making, is our goal. Right answers are merely the side-effect.
Don’t send your children off to work homework problems on their own. You keep the math book and read the problems aloud. Let them have scratch paper (or even better, a whiteboard with colorful markers).
Don’t tell them whether an answer is right or wrong. Instead ask, “How do you know? Convince me it’s true.”
Justifying our answers, convincing ourselves and our listeners that something is true, this is the heart of mathematical thinking.
We had a great discussion! Listen to the whole thing:
* * *
If you enjoyed my conversation with Cindy and Dawn, you might like my ongoing blog post series: Charlotte Mason Math. Scroll down to read the series from the beginning.
Are you looking for more creative ways to play math with your kids? Check out all my books, printable activities, and cool mathy merch at Denise Gaskins’ Playful Math Store. Or join my email newsletter.
This blog is reader-supported. If you’d like to help fund the blog on an on-going basis, then please join me on Patreon for mathy inspiration, tips, and an ever-growing archive of printable activities.
“Podcast: The Beauty of Math in the Charlotte Mason Paradigm” copyright © 2024 by Denise Gaskins. Image at the top of the post “A winter’s tale of Sprites and Goblins” (1886), by Dennis Miller Bunker, public domain.
Denise Gaskins' Let's Play Math 