My Math Journaling Adventures Series is now available on Kickstarter.
I love these books!
Writing is one of the best ways to learn math deeply, because wrestling our thoughts into words forces us to figure out what we really believe.
It’s the natural, no-stress way to build our children’s understanding and confidence.
Hit the button to visit the campaign and order your books:
Math Journaling Adventures Kickstarter ❯
Continue reading Why I Love the Math Journaling Adventures Series
And so it begins: the Math Journaling Adventures is LIVE on Kickstarter!
⭐ Don’t delay! First-day backers get the best deals. Choose one of the Earlybird rewards:
To have a successful campaign, we need plenty of people to back the project early. The more supporters we get in these early days, the more likely the Kickstarter platform folks will help spread the news for us.
Continue reading Math Journaling Adventures Launched: Order Your Copy Today
I have a new podcast interview, and I think you’ll enjoy it!
Check out Pam Barnhill’s Homeschool Better Together on your favorite podcast app, or listen on the website:
Here’s an excerpt…
Lately, I’ve spent most of my writing time thinking about the value of narration—the Charlotte Mason approach to teaching by getting kids to put ideas in their own words.
For students, I’m writing a new series of Math Adventure Journals to get them thinking about math and putting those thoughts into words. If you’re interested, sign up to be notified when the Kickstarter goes live.
But we parents can harness the value of narration in our own learning. After all, one of the best ways we can help our children learn mathematics (or anything else) is to be lifelong learners ourselves.
To that end, I’ve decided to relaunch my “Morning Coffee” series of professional development posts for homeschooling parents.
As I read articles and follow rabbit trails around the internet, I’ll collect the posts that speak to me. Then I’ll share these in a printable format with journaling pages for your response.
Since I’m interested in math education, many of the articles I read will be about math—but the principles of learning apply to every subject we teach.
To kick off the series, let’s start with one of my favorite articles ever…
Download your printable Morning Coffee journal
David Butler’s post Twelve matchsticks: focus or funnel presents an interesting math puzzle. But even better, it opens up a rabbit hole of thought-provoking posts about how to talk with children—or anyone:
“The approach where you have an idea in your head of how it should be done and you try to get the student to fill in the blanks is called funnelling. It’s actually a rather unpleasant experience as a student to be funnelled by a teacher. You don’t know what the teacher is getting at, and often you feel like there is a key piece of information they are withholding from you, and when it comes, the punchline feels rather flat.”
The printable file includes links to three more articles as I follow the rabbit around the internet. Enjoy!
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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.
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“Morning Coffee: Professional Development for Homeschooling Parents and Other Teachers” copyright © 2025 by Denise Gaskins. Image at the top of post copyright © Kira auf der Heide / Unsplash.
I recently listened to you on Cindy Rollins’ podcast, and I was captivated by your perspective on math. It was exciting, freeing, and wonder-filled. I would absolutely love to be able to teach in the ways you described.
We use early-elementary Saxon Math right now, which is thorough, but has SO MUCH to do that I’ve always struggled to do it all. Then I feel like I’m missing things, and I never know quite what is important. And yet, the actual lessons move so slowly that my kids get bored with the repetition.
I use a published curriculum because I have no idea of an appropriate scope and sequence, or similar flow of learning. With your playful approach to math, how do I know where to start, and what to do each day?
Do you have a suggested order to approach your books to have a full math approach? A sort of curriculum, per se, using your books.
[For those who missed my chat with Cindy Rollins about a Charlotte Mason approach to math, you can listen to it here.]
Continue reading FAQ: Can I Use Your Books as a Math Curriculum?
“I love your image of math as a nature walk. My children are ready to start their homeschooling journey, and I want to put them on the right track from the beginning. How can I help them think about math and problem-solving without using a textbook?”
The most difficult part of teaching our children real math is to change our own way of thinking about the subject you’ve already taken that step, so it looks like your family’s learning journey is off to a great start.
[For readers who are wondering what I mean by math as a nature walk, check out this post. You may also enjoy my article on natural learning: Math with Young Children.]
Correct answers are important, of course, but as children explain their thinking, they will often catch and fix mistakes on their own.
“Two and two make four and cannot by any possibility that the universe affords be made to make five or three. From this point of view, of immutable law, children should approach Mathematics; they should see how impressive is Euclid’s ‘Which is absurd,’ just as absurd as would be the statements of a man who said that his apples always fell upwards, and for the same reason.”
— Charlotte Mason, Towards a Philosophy of Education
“Most remarks made by children consist of correct ideas badly expressed. A good teacher will be wary of saying ‘No, that’s wrong.’ Rather, he will try to discover the correct idea behind the inadequate expression. This is one of the most important principles in the whole of the art of teaching.”
— W. W. Sawyer, Vision in Elementary Mathematics
Continue reading Charlotte Mason Math: Practical Tips for a Living Math Education
The second place where a surface-level reading of Charlotte Mason’s books can lead to misunderstanding involves the treatment of wrong answers. Mason wrote:
“… quite as bad as these is the habit of allowing that a sum is nearly right, two figures wrong, and so on, and letting the child work it over again. Pronounce a sum wrong, or right — it cannot be something between the two. That which is wrong must remain wrong: the child must not be let run away with the notion that wrong can be mended into right.”
— Charlotte Mason, Home Education
Does this call to mind images of your own childhood schoolwork? It does for me: laboring over a worksheet or quiz and then taking it to my teacher to be graded. Right was right, and wrong could not be mended. In such a performance-oriented setting, mistakes can take on the flavor of moral failure.
Is this authoritarian approach the way Mason wants us to teach math to our children? Where is the summa corda — the joyful praise — in that?
No. Please, no. Very definitely no.
Mason wanted us to avoid slovenliness in our teaching. In this passage, she warned against several forms this might take.
Continue reading Charlotte Mason Math: Wrong Answers and Slovenly Teaching
Two passages in Charlotte Mason’s writing about math are in my opinion widely misunderstood. The first relates to the proper use of manipulatives.
Mason believed strongly in the importance of physical objects and oral work (mental math) in early math education. In her priorities, the use of written calculation fell in distant third place.
“A bag of beans, counters, or buttons should be used in all the early arithmetic lessons, and the child should be able to work with these freely, and even to add, subtract, multiply, and divide mentally, without the aid of buttons or beans, before he is set to ‘do sums’ on his slate.”
— Charlotte Mason, Home Education
Continue reading Charlotte Mason Math: The Trouble with Manipulatives
“Teachers have seldom time to give the inspiring ideas, what Coleridge calls, the ‘Captain’ ideas, which should quicken imagination. How living would Geometry become in the light of the discoveries of Euclid as he made them!”
— Charlotte Mason, Towards a Philosophy of Education
The Captain ideas are the great Truths of a subject, the things that make our minds wake up and pay attention, that energize our thoughts and make us yearn for more.
In math, living ideas are the big principles that tie together many branches of the subject. Things like:
• Proportion — where two quantities are connected so they scale up or scale down in tandem. For instance, if we double the number of cars in the driveway, that automatically doubles the number of tires.
• Transformation — how we can change things while keeping important attributes the same. Like, if we shrink a square, its area will change, but the angles stay the same.
Continue reading Charlotte Mason Math: Finding Time for Big Ideas
Denise Gaskins' Let's Play Math 