Podcast: Making Math a Delight

The first thing to do when our kids get stuck is to celebrate, because that gives us a learning opportunity.

As long as children are doing math they know how to do, they aren’t really learning. You could give your sixth-grader a first-grade textbook, and he’d never get stuck. In a sixth-grade book, however, he may get stuck a lot.

And that’s good!

But remember, when your children get stuck, the wrong thing to do is to tell give them a rule or procedure to follow. What children really need is to learn how to handle being stuck. They need to learn what to do when they don’t know what to do.

That’s a life skill that goes far beyond math.