[Rescued from my old blog.]
I love Miquon math, but the program does feel odd to many homeschoolers, especially at first. It is so different from the math most of us grew up with that it takes time for the teacher to adjust. DJ asked for Miquon advice at a forum I frequent, but I thought enough people might find these tips useful to justify an expanded repost. If you have more advice on teaching Miquon, please chime in!
[Rescued from my old blog. To read the entire series, click here: Elementary Problem Solving Series. Photo by Studio 757 via Flickr (CC BY 2.0).]
You can begin to teach your children algebraic thinking in preschool, if you treat algebra as a problem-solving game. Young children are masters at solving problems, at figuring things out. They constantly explore their world, piecing together the mystery of how things work. For preschool children, mathematical concepts are just part of life’s daily adventure. Their minds grapple with understanding the three-ness of three blocks or three fingers or one raisin plus two more raisins make three.
Wise homeschooling parents put those creative minds to work. They build a foundation for algebra with games that require the same problem-solving skills children need for abstract math: the ability to visualize a situation and to apply common sense.
Continue reading Elementary Problem Solving: The Early Years
The Carnival of Mathematics: Inaugural Edition is up and running at Abstract Nonsense blog.
Alon writes:
I’ve gotten plenty of submissions that span the entire gamut of math-blogging: education, pure math, applied math, debunking bad math – it’s all there. Only the gender distribution could be made slightly more equal (and that’s an understatement). I’m linking to the posters in roughly increasing order of mathematical difficulty, but don’t let my opinions deter you from reading the posts closer to the bottom.
Indeed, there are many great posts to read. Enjoy!
In playing around with my sidebar organization, I noticed that I had only posted one article under the “Resources” category. Actually, I had forgotten I made that category — but it’s a good idea. There are a ton of great math resources out on the Web, and I’d love to introduce you to some of my favorites.
So I spent the last two days sorting through several folders’ worth of bookmarks to find the best math resource links for my sidebar. (Scroll down to “A+ math resources.”) Most of these are the math websites I find myself turning to again and again for teaching ideas or just for personal pleasure, though a few are ones I haven’t used but that looked very interesting. In the future, perhaps I will take time to write about them individually, but for now, I invite you to click and enjoy.
And please, share your own favorites with me! I’m always eager to learn more about math.
These links were later expanded to become my Free (Mostly) Math Resources page.
Well, I didn’t get any takers with the last story problem challenge. But school is in full session now, and we’re doing story problems in Math Club this Friday, so I thought I’d try again.
Here’s the challenge: Can you and your students make up some original math problems?
In Math Club, we always start by reading part of the book Math by Kids for inspiration. I can’t print those stories here, however, because of copyright rules, so I’ll share some of the stories my past students have made, arranged in roughly increasing order of difficulty. After you solve a couple of these problems with your children, encourage them to try making some of their own.
And please, share their gems with us!
The problems below are now available as a printable handout: Story Problem Challenge.
It’s been ages since I shared the blackboard quotes from my co-op math classes. Here are some of our recent ones for your reading pleasure…
[Rescued from my old blog.]
Once again, Rudbeckia Hirta brings us some funny-but-sad mathematics. The test question was:
Without factoring it, explain how the number
N = (1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x 5 x 6 x 7 x 8 x 9 x 10 x 11) + 1
can be used to argue that there is a prime number larger than 11.
The 57th Carnival of Homeschooling featured a couple of math-related posts:
I want to tell you a story. Everyone likes a story, right? But at the heart of my story lies a confession that I am afraid will shock many readers. People assume that because I teach math, blog about math, give advice about math on internet forums, and present workshops about teaching math — because I do all this, I must be good at math.
Apply logic to that statement. The conclusion simply isn’t valid. …
Update: This post has moved.
Project Follow Through was an almost-30-year study that compared the effect of different teaching methods on over 20,000 students nationwide. I have started reading The Outrage of Project Follow Through: 5 Million Failed Kids Later [site no longer exists, but try this book: Project Follow Through: A Case Study of Contingencies Influencing Instructional Practices of the Educational Establishment], which explains the research and its results in layman’s terms. So far, I have enjoyed the book, which is being released chapter-by-chapter every Monday. The introductory chapter will be available only for the remainder of this week, however, so if you are curious, you had better act now. I recommend downloading the pdf file to read at leisure: Right-click on the link for each chapter, then choose the “Save” option.
[Hat tip: D-Ed Reckoning, who is running a series of articles (part 1 here) highlighting his favorite parts of the book.]
Denise Gaskins' Let's Play Math 