Post from the Past: Help with Math and Reading

This post was from last year; it’s incredible to read again and see how far he’s come in just one school year!

The best way I have found to help Ian get everything done is to make him do his least favorite subject first, and early in the morning at that. It used to be reading, and then math for a while, but I have no idea yet what this year will bring. It will probably be writing. Doing his least favorite subject first helped both him and me. Until we started getting up earlier I found that I would procrastinate beginning the school day at all when I knew we had to look forward to the dreaded subject, and all of the whining that accompanied it. So I just got Ian up early, and started the day with it. Sometimes we would even do it before breakfast. That leaves the rest of the day to look forward to.

I also have trouble getting Ian motivated to complete his work in a timely fashion. So I’ll tell him he has 2 hours to get done with math and play his video game. His next subject starts promptly when those 2 hours are up. If he spends 1 hour and 45 minutes on his math, he’ll only have 15 minutes to play. I think this is helping motivate him, but it’s a slow process. (If he could stay focused, his math would probably only take him about 20 minutes, but he gets distracted so easily. I keep thinking that he would probably be diagnosed with ADHD if I sent him to a public school.)

One of the ways I have failed Ian is by procrastinating in teaching him his math facts. I think he could finish his math in about 10 minutes (distractions aside) if he didn’t have to figure every single problem out from scratch. So we’re taking the month of September to work on flashcards. I’m going to let him answer as many addition facts as possible in 60 seconds. Then we’re going to see if we can add a couple of cards to the pile while completing them in the same amount of time. We gave it a try the other day, and it was definitely more fun than reciting facts. We’re also going to do subtraction and beginning multiplication and division, but separately for a while.

I don’t have any idea if you all are struggling with reading, but here is what I have done: I have prioritized reading way over science, history, etc. I figured the faster he could learn to read well, the better. I merely read Ian’s science and history out loud to him last year; we spent most of his study time learning to read better. I don’t know if this has anything to do with it, but Ian’s reading skills just took off when we bought him the Kid’s Day by Day Bible and had him read to himself from it every night. Until your child is really excelling in the basic areas: reading, writing, arithmetic – I wouldn’t worry too much about the other subjects, except Bible, of course, which you can count for history. You could also get some nature readers and knock out science while working on reading skills.

Post from the Past: Math in Action

I’m going somewhere with this; just hear me out.

Ian has been playing Little Big Planet for months now. After completing each level, the video game tells you what percent of the prizes you have collected from that particular level. He learned pretty quickly that we always aimed for 100%. If we didn’t get 100%, that means we missed something, and we would usually go back and try the level again to see if we could find what we missed. Sometimes there were twenty or thirty things in a level, but never 100 things. Ian figured out that 100% meant “all.” Yesterday, he was playing again. He found a level that he wanted to play and said, “Wow! I don’t even have half of the stuff for this level!” It kind of surprised me that he said that because we’ve never gone into percentages in detail (he’s only six). So, just to find out how much he knew, I said, “So what percent would it be if you had half of the stuff?” “50%,” he says. Hmmm. So I said, “If there were 8 things to get in a level, and you had 50% of them, how many would you have?” He thought for ten or fifteen seconds and said, “4.” Hmmmmmm! I was so impressed, I had to send an email to Jesse at work. Impressed, because I never taught him. He figured out how percentages work on his own, the same way babies learn to use language – by seeing it in action. When Jesse came home from work last night, we were all sitting in the same room, and I thought I’d dig a little deeper into Ian’s well of knowledge. So I said, “Ian do you know how many 25’s there are in 100?” He didn’t. “Remember talking about money? How many quarters are in a dollar?” “Oh, yeah,” he says, “4!” “Okay, so if there were 4 things to get, and you had 25%, how many would you have?” Brief pause. “1!” Explosion of amazement and pride from me and Jesse. “What if there were 8 things to get? How many would you have if you had 25%?” Slightly longer pause. “2!” Yay! I’m so proud of him! Can you tell? So, thanks to Little Big Planet, and a little scaffolding from me (by using Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development), Ian understands percentages. We have another video game called Boom Blox that has made him an expert when it comes to negative numbers. It doesn’t set out to teach you the concept; that’s not the purpose of the game. However, if you lose enough points, your score drops below zero, and since it took Ian a while to get good at the game, he has LOTS of experience with negative numbers 🙂

I said all of that to say this: when teaching math, take time to make sure your child understands each concept. Start with the why, see if they can understand it and figure a few easy problems based on what they know, and then teach them how to work the problem. You’ll be amazed at what they can do.

Help with Math and Reading

The best way I have found to help Ian get everything done is to make him do his least favorite subject first, and early in the morning at that. It used to be reading, and then math for a while, but I have no idea yet what this year will bring. It will probably be writing. Doing his least favorite subject first helped both him and me. Until we started getting up earlier I found that I would procrastinate beginning the school day at all when I knew we had to look forward to the dreaded subject, and all of the whining that accompanied it. So I just got Ian up early, and started the day with it. Sometimes we would even do it before breakfast. That leaves the rest of the day to look forward to.

I also have trouble getting Ian motivated to complete his work in a timely fashion. So I’ll tell him he has 2 hours to get done with math and play his video game. His next subject starts promptly when those 2 hours are up. If he spends 1 hour and 45 minutes on his math, he’ll only have 15 minutes to play. I think this is helping motivate him, but it’s a slow process. (If he could stay focused, his math would probably only take him about 20 minutes, but he gets distracted so easily. I keep thinking that he would probably be diagnosed with ADHD if I sent him to a public school.)

One of the ways I have failed Ian is by procrastinating in teaching him his math facts. I think he could finish his math in about 10 minutes (distractions aside) if he didn’t have to figure every single problem out from scratch. So we’re taking the month of September to work on flashcards. I’m going to let him answer as many addition facts as possible in 60 seconds. Then we’re going to see if we can add a couple of cards to the pile while completing them in the same amount of time. We gave it a try the other day, and it was definitely more fun than reciting facts. We’re also going to do subtraction and beginning multiplication and division, but separately for a while.

I don’t have any idea if you all are struggling with reading, but here is what I have done: I have prioritized reading way over science, history, etc. I figured the faster he could learn to read well, the better. I merely read Ian’s science and history out loud to him last year; we spent most of his study time learning to read better. I don’t know if this has anything to do with it, but Ian’s reading skills just took off when we bought him the Kid’s Day by Day Bible and had him read to himself from it every night. Until your child is really excelling in the basic areas: reading, writing, arithmetic – I wouldn’t worry too much about the other subjects, except Bible, of course, which you can count for history. You could also get some nature readers and knock out science while working on reading skills.

Math and God

I just finished reading a blog post about our aversion to advanced math, and a though struck me. Math exists. Math is true; it always works. It’s based on facts that don’t change with time, the weather, or how you feel at the moment. The more I started thinking about it, the more I realized how like God math is. People shy away from math as soon as it becomes difficult for them. They don’t want to take the time to really break things down and wrap their minds around each and every concept. But when you do work at it a little, it’s really satisfying to understand something that was once hidden. I was thinking about how worldly the church has become. Children don’t honor their parents, wives don’t submit to their husbands. We read the same books, watch the same movies; we want to be like the world, to fit in. We don’t like want to stick out like a sore thumb. We’re content to stay just where we are. But the further we go on the path to holiness, the more we understand. Everything comes together and begins to make sense. We begin to realize just how wrong we were to resist.

Math in Action

I’m going somewhere with this; just hear me out.

Ian has been playing Little Big Planet for months now. After completing each level, the video game tells you what percent of the prizes you have collected from that particular level. He learned pretty quickly that we always aimed for 100%. If we didn’t get 100%, that means we missed something, and we would usually go back and try the level again to see if we could find what we missed. Sometimes there were twenty or thirty things in a level, but never 100 things. Ian figured out that 100% meant “all.” Yesterday, he was playing again. He found a level that he wanted to play and said, “Wow! I don’t even have half of the stuff for this level!” It kind of surprised me that he said that because we’ve never gone into percentages in detail (he’s only six). So, just to find out how much he knew, I said, “So what percent would it be if you had half of the stuff?” “50%,” he says. Hmmm. So I said, “If there were 8 things to get in a level, and you had 50% of them, how many would you have?” He thought for ten or fifteen seconds and said, “4.” Hmmmmmm! I was so impressed, I had to send an email to Jesse at work. Impressed, because I never taught him. He figured out how percentages work on his own, the same way babies learn to use language – by seeing it in action. When Jesse came home from work last night, we were all sitting in the same room, and I thought I’d dig a little deeper into Ian’s well of knowledge. So I said, “Ian do you know how many 25’s there are in 100?” He didn’t. “Remember talking about money? How many quarters are in a dollar?” “Oh, yeah,” he says, “4!” “Okay, so if there were 4 things to get, and you had 25%, how many would you have?” Brief pause. “1!” Explosion of amazement and pride from me and Jesse. “What if there were 8 things to get? How many would you have if you had 25%?” Slightly longer pause. “2!” Yay! I’m so proud of him! Can you tell? So, thanks to Little Big Planet, and a little scaffolding from me (by using Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development), Ian understands percentages. We have another video game called Boom Blox that has made him an expert when it comes to negative numbers. It doesn’t set out to teach you the concept; that’s not the purpose of the game. However, if you lose enough points, your score drops below zero, and since it took Ian a while to get good at the game, he has LOTS of experience with negative numbers 🙂

I said all of that to say this: when teaching math, take time to make sure your child understands each concept. Start with the why, see if they can understand it and figure a few easy problems based on what they know, and then teach them how to work the problem. You’ll be amazed at what they can do.