Subscribe to my feed
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!
great article. math is very scary for my kids. this article discuss great ideas of how to make math kids friendly and they dont get scared of maths.