It adds up

Like most new homeschoolers, I came into this whole affair with preconceived notions. I was a product of institutionalized education. It was all I knew; and, clearly, it had done a fairly decent job in accomplishing the goal of producing a productive citizen. So when I sat down to begin teaching my first child, it was with the same structure and sequence in mind with which I had learned. You know the drill: reading in kindergarten, multiplication in third grade, biology in tenth. The catalogs of colorful curriculum options backed up the mindset with which I was familiar. I could, with very little effort on my behalf, have an entire year’s worth of pre-selected supplies and materials delivered to my door-step simply by checking the box marked “kindergarten.”

And so we did. That first, banner year was outfitted in its entirety by Calvert, a long-time stalwart in the homeschooling community. There wasn’t much imagination in the curriculum itself (a pre-packaged collection of assignments and lessons assembled with a classroom of students in mind will never truly engage one, single learner at home), but it was exactly what anyone would recognize as The First Year of School. We started with the alphabet, counting, and holding scissors properly, then progressed to word phonics, addition, and tying shoes. It was good stuff, and it felt real.

You know what real means in terms of a new homeschooler, right? Real means “It felt like I was doing something more than playing school.” Real means “when dubious family members ask what we did all day, I have something to tell them.” Real means “a professional educator would recognize it as fitting into a scope and sequence chart.”

Real usually, too, means grabbing on to the most official looking, most recognizably “schoolish” workbooks and teaching materials available, and sticking as close as possible to what the local schools are teaching at any given time. Which is great, except …

Well, except for the fact that that those workbooks are deigned to hit right at the average level of a whole classroom full of students. And the schedule is made to fit around scheduled breaks and holidays and trainings and testing seasons. And– are you ready for this? The biggest secret of all is that the educational system has no corner on the market of understanding how children learn. Oh, sure. They’re great at nailing what it takes to get the largest percentage of one fourth grade class up to speed on reading comprehension. But when it comes to helping one child meander and master the skills of educational discipline … not so much.

I wish I had understood that back in 2002. Heck, I wish I had learned that by 2006. Mary Hannah was nine then, and math phobic through and through. I hadn’t expected that she would be anything else, so I wasn’t alarmed. Very few people that I could recall from my own school days had liked mathematics. An even smaller sampling of the group was actually any good at it as a subject. Math was something to be tolerated, to be endured, and to finally, finally be rid of once high school came to a close. Mary Hannah was simply following the same trajectory most of us had followed. So what if the girl didn’t like math?

It wasn’t until the end of that school year, as I sat across from the patient, enthusiastic assessor we had hired to evaluate her overall progress and fulfill our testing requirement, that my thinking was challenged. D had several degrees in education. She had also homeschooled– and graduated– her own children in addition to working with hundred of others. I was nothing she hadn’t seen before: a 4-year veteran who had loosened the reins somewhat in her “school at home” thinking, but who was still held captive to  “this is how it’s done” thinking in far too many ways. D was also sadly familiar with my daughter’s plight: a smart, curious girl who somehow couldn’t grasp the nuances of numbers.

Thankfully, D wasn’t content to leave us sitting in our ignorance. In one long, encouraging yet painful session, she tore down everything I thought I knew about math: how to teach it, how to express it, how to experience it, how to do it.

Living math, she assured me, was what was needed.

I was reluctant. I admit it. It was completely counter to everything I knew about math, which was, apparently, not much. Playing games? Verbal exchanges? Counting change? Measuring? No workbooks? But how was I going to know if she had learned anything?

We went home, and began again. I shelved the Horizons, bought a glut of manipulatives, and set to work unlearning my own bad math background. Along the way, I figured out a few things about numbers, about how children learn, and about how sometimes, what looks like a laissez faire attitude towards an entire branch of the educational tree is actually far more productive than putting that same topic under a microscope.

Math for my current crop of homeschooled littles looks like this:

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Following along with a story about a farmer and his fruit trees from Scholastic’s Instant Math Storymats.

 

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Counting by 3s with dice.

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Phineas’ fruit tree grows both oranges AND apples. Lucky farmer!

 

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Learning to sort and identify coins prior to a shopping game.

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Deciphering a puzzle with Unfix cubes.

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Adding with Inchimals.

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Matching the number 1s.

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Playing a Family Math game.

 

So what do we do? We bake often, measuring, counting and adding as we go. We read a ton of living math books. We ask questions about real life situations, and take the time to figure them out (“We have six balls. There are four children. Are there enough balls for everyone to have one? How about two?”). We employ rulers and tape measures. We name the shapes on the road signs. We build things. We play games– countless games that involve finding patterns, counting spaces, adding, dividing, multiplying.

Far from being behind what a textbook would be teaching them (aside from the actual written equations), the mathematical thinking displayed in my children far exceeds what I expect from their ages. A crazy, upside down truth, but there it is; in finally surrendering the ideal of what real learning should look like, I’ve been able to watch my children experience what real learning is.

 

(Some of our favorite math resources, in no order: Family Math, Double Shutter, Unifix Cube activities, Math Storymats, Inchimals, adapted learning games with cards, random math games I create, similar to this one with Matchbox cars, lots of tangrams, Teddy Bear math books, Rush Hour and similar puzzle games, pattern beads, Making Math Meaningful)

6 thoughts on “It adds up

  1. I would love to know what you did with MH when you first started. Both my kids are struggling, E is the age MH was when you had your revelation. Lillie is 7.

    • Do you mean when we first went back and started over? Our main focus at that time was literally starting over. We ended up going back and doing MUS Alpha … but not until after we had a good, long season of just playing with numbers and reacquainting her with the fact that she got it. We did tons of verbal math; I literally used some of the word problems from Ray’s Arithmetic, and we sat and worked them out with manipulatives. She did a “vet journal” which I made for her. I took a spiral notebook and presented “cases” for her based on her love of animals. I wrote them up like real patients coming in to a vet clinic. It was all very “real”(ish). I gave age, weight, and told what the problem was. Then she had to calculate out medicine doses, or find ideal weight, that sort of thing. It was a lot of work on my behalf, but it was so worth it.

  2. Animal Crossing!–we used to play that too. I’ve linked to this post.

  3. Thank you for sharing this information! I have noticed that my kids retain more when they are interested in the topic. It seems so obvious now, but I remember rereading sections of textbooks over and over because I dreaded the material when I was in school. I was reading the paragraphs, but not retaining anything until the 3rd or 4th time reading it.

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