Preparing Miss.SingSong for Math

In The Well-Trained Mind Jessie Wise shares the cautionary tale of two sixteen-year-old students in her sixth grade class who hadn't yet learned to read.  She vowed that her children would never be in such a situation, and so taught her young son to read at age four.  This is how she began homeschooling.  I had a similar experience my last year teaching, but it had more to do with math.



In all of my years teaching I had students who were mathematically challenged.  None quite so much as a tenth grader I had my last year.  I remember being in a parent-student-teacher conference with her.  I was telling her parents that she needed remediation, and that I could help her some after school, but she would benefit more from one-on-one tutoring that I could not provide.  Her parents wanted to know how far back I thought she should be remediated.

Earlier in the day I had conferred with one of the principals in the school and told him the conversation I would be having.  He advised me to not tell them the truth - this girl needed to go back to third grade math!  The principal said that it would look bad on the school that we had just been moving her up each year even though she wasn't ready.  And so I did what I could for her, and passed her on to the next math teacher at the end of the year.



My heart aches for her!  It is not her fault that the system has failed her.  But when she pulled a calculator out in class to answer 3 x 1, I was stuck.  I could not stop what I was teaching in a class of 30 students for the one.  I vowed that my children would never be in such a situation.

Some time ago my mom sent this article on to me.  I was thrilled!  Can all parents please do this??  Math teachers and your future engineers will thank you!  Math is not hard or scary!  Miss.SingSong and I count every day.  All day.  Everything.

We do a lot of addition.  For example, we add the number of bowls on the top rack of the dishwasher to the number of bowls on the bottom rack of the dishwasher.  We do this with cups, and plates, too.  When we add with zero, I tell her that's called the additive identity.  When we add the same numbers in opposite order (3 plates plus 2 plates, then 2 bowls plus 3 bowls) I explain that addition is commutative.  We haven't quite reached the associative property yet...  And she really doesn't know what I'm talking about, but if she hears it every day year after year, it won't seem so complicated!

When she eats her little finger foods off her tray we do subtraction.  So far we subtract one or two at a time.  We play subtraction with her three little bath toys.  She thinks subtraction is hilarious.

We cut things into fractions and count how many pieces you get if you cut into halves or thirds or fourths.  We talk about half of a half being a fourth or a quarter.  When I need three cups of something, we count them, and talk about what fraction I have so far, one-third of the total, if I add another third, then I have one-third plus one-third and that's two-thirds.

We talk about directions and opposites and relational positions.  Under, over, around, through, on, besides, up, down.

We compare things.  That truck is bigger than that car.  That girl on her bike is going faster than we are walking, but slower than the car that just passed her.  These spoons are bigger than these spoons; I'm holding more of the big spoons.

These are all math concepts, and the nerd in me rejoices in it all!  Yes, I am aware that I am probably raising a nerd.  But she's a nerd who will control the world some day, so be nice ;)