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Tomorrow is Halloween! Whether it’s watching a horror movie or jumping out from behind a door, many people find it fun to be scared or scary on this holiday. It’s also a good time to revisit what parents can do to keep their children from becoming afraid of math. Math anxiety is unnecessarily common in the United States. As a country we have focused intentily on promoting foundational literacy skills, but numeracy skills can also be fostered from an early age. At home, don’t just read to your toddler and pre-schooler; “math” to them also. Get down on the floor with your kids and some blocks to show them what “more” and “less” and different numbers actually mean. Make patterns out of just about anything age-safe such as different color socks or whole fruits and vegetables. When your kids are around 5-6 years old, playing with coins (counting and adding pennies, exchanging coins, etc.) on the floor is another fun activity.
Math outdoors is fun too! Go to the park and arrange rocks or wood chips into rows and columns. Draw shapes in the sandbox. Are there shapes that look the same no matter where you stand? Which shapes look like they’ve flipped or turned? Make shapes out of sticks. Compare the sticks. Which is longer? Which is shorter? Add sticks to go from a triangle to a rectangle to a pentagon and so on. If you keep adding sticks, what does your shape start to look like? (Don’t freak out, but you just did a little Calculus.)
Good old-fashioned floor time or outdoor time are excellent ways of cementing learning with positive memories. As your kids get older, make sure they are exposed regularly throughout their childhood and adolecense to adults who explain math well and enjoy it, especially if you don’t. And if you have math anxiety yourself, make that your best-kept secret. Math doesn’t have to be scary.
Now, what do you get when you take the circumference of a jack-o-lantern divided by its diameter? Answer: A pumpkin π. Happy Halloween from IMACS!
Once upon a time, there was a bright student who first came to IMACS when he was already in high school. He was interested in learning to program and had heard high praise for our University Computer Science courses. The class began smoothly as teacher and pupil progressed through the principles of computational thinking. This student, who was used to conquering schoolwork with his brain tied behind his back, slayed the early exercises with ease. As the assignments quickly became more challenging, however, he found himself unaccustomed to the effort of intellectual struggle. One day, our earnest student declared to his IMACS instructor that a certain programming problem was simply impossible to solve! Our wise and experienced teacher considered this student with a measured gaze and pointed out, “But you’ve only thought about it for three minutes.” The student, quite politely, seriously, and honestly replied, “Well, yeah.” If only he had started IMACS when he was younger. The moral of the story: The earlier the experience of true intellectual challenge, the stronger the will of the mind to persevere. (In other words, enroll your elementary school child in IMACS today!)