Wiley Wednesday
Teaching and Learning
Making Math Meaningful
This is not how I learned it!
Your child’s mathematics classroom looks quite different from what you remember from your own days in the classroom. Instead of the teacher demonstrating a problem on the board and students silently copying the work, you will see students working together to investigate a problem while the teacher acts as a facilitator. Instead of students applying memorized rules and procedures, you will observe students discussing and questioning various ways to find solutions to problems.
Over the past few decades, teachers have greatly improved their understanding of how students learn mathematics. Students are now more actively involved in making sense of the mathematics they are learning. Learning mathematics is an active process of building new knowledge from experience and prior knowledge.
How You Can Help at Home
2. Link Math to Real World Application - Help your child realize that mathematics is an integral part of everyday life. Each day, people are involved with mathematics. For example, one may have to decide whether he/she has enough money to make a purchase, or use a map to find out where he/she is going, or develop a schedule, or determine the price of an item on sale.
3. Make Math Fun - Play board games, solve puzzles, and ponder brain teasers with your child. These fun activities enhance mathematical thinking. Be sure to point out the mathematics involved and discuss the various math strategies used.
4. Learn about Mathematical Careers - Mathematics is foundational to a wide variety of intriguing careers. Research different careers with your child and find out what skills he or she has or will need to acquire to prepare for these options.
5. Ask Questions
- What new idea did you learn today?
- What was the most interesting idea, concept or fact you learned?
- What was the most challenging thing you did today?
- What do you already know that can help you work through the problem?
- What did you feel most successful with?
~ The Family’s Guide: Fostering Your Child’s Success in School Mathematics, published by NCTM
Do Everyday Math Together
- Count everything! Count toys, kitchen utensils and items of clothing as they come out of the dryer. Help your child count by pointing to and moving the objects as you say each number out loud. Count forward and backwards from different starting places.
- Discover the many ways in which numbers are used inside and outside your home. Take your child on a “number hunt” in your home or neighborhood. • Ask your child to help you solve everyday number problems. “We need six tomatoes to make out sauce for dinner and we have only two. How many more do we need to buy?”
- Practice “skip counting”. Together, count by 2’s and 5’s. Ask your child how far he or she can count by 10’s. Roll two dice, one to determine a starting number and the other to determine the counting interval. Ask your child to try counting backwards from 10, 20 or even 100.
- Incorporate measuring during everyday activities, such as cooking, gardening, crafts, or home-improvement projects. Practice measuring things with a ruler, yardstick, tape measure, measuring cup, and scale.
- Go on a “shape hunt”. Have your child look for as many circles, squares, triangles and rectangles as he or she can find in the home or outside. Do the same with three- dimensional objects like cubes, cones, spheres and cylinders.
3rd, 4th, and 5th Grades:
- Estimate everything! Estimate the number of steps from your front door to the edge of your yard or estimate the cost of the groceries in the cart.
- Keep charts or graphs to help your child organize information and keep track of data. A child who is saving his allowance to buy an item might create a chart or graph to show how much he can save.
- Open a savings account. Work with your child to keep track of deposits, withdrawals, and interest and to compare this record with the monthly bank statement.
- Encourage a child who is a sports enthusiast to keep track of scores and statistics. She can collect data from the newspaper or Internet in a notebook and use these data to make predictions about future performance. She can graph changes over time, for example, the average points scored per game for a favorite basketball player. Finally, your child might keep track of her own performance if she is involved in a sport.
Fun & Games at Home
Here are some online games and resources to engage your children at home.
- Bedtime Math (PreK-5): Daily problems you can use to talk math with your kids and encourage them to think about numbers in their everyday lives!
- Arcamedics Games (1-6): Review games on a variety of topics.
- "Acing Math" Card Games: These games can be played with a simple deck of cards. Build math skills while spending time together as a family!
- Math Games (K-5) Online math games on a variety of topics.
- PBS Math Games (K-4) Learn about math and play games with your favorite characters like Peg + Cat, Curious George, the Cat in the Hat and Dinosaur Train!