Tag: distance

  • Egg Hunt Shows Natural Math Ability

    Egg Hunt Shows Natural Math Ability

    I saw natural math ability yesterday!

    K8 was hunting Easter eggs at Mawmaw & Pawpaw’s house. She saw an egg inside the sandbox. As she reached into the box she realized the egg was too far away.

    She was standing where the footprints are. The egg was where the striped egg is:

    She needed to step inside the sandbox.

    The “easy” answer was to step inside the sandbox. But she wanted no part of the gritty sand.

    With no hesitation, she moved from her location, around the sandbox to the new spot:

    This took some effort because she had to squat to get under the ladder. But she had seen that avoiding the sand was possible if she accessed the egg from the other side.

    She recognized and compared distances!

    With no vocabulary or formal training (indeed she’s 2 1/2 years old) she identified perpendicular distance! She assessed which side of the square sandbox would minimize this distance. And she acted on that assessment.

    It’s normal for parents to believe their children are especially smart, gifted or brilliant. I believe that all children are these things.

    Kids have a natural math ability. And so do you.

    What do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments and make sure to share this story with your twitter network!

    Related articles
  • Teaching Math with Counting

    Teaching Math with Counting

    Counting is a big deal in our household these days. Daughter’s 21 months old so teaching advanced multivariable calculus takes way too long for her attention span.

    Walking Steps and Counting Them

    But we count everything. Things in books, steps, bobby pins, people… you name it.

    We count in negatives, too.

    If you’re following my tweets, you might know that I count to Daughter in the bathtub – from negative 30 to positive 30.

    My neighbor suggested that early introduction to negatives might have helped her friend’s 14 year old son. He now has all sorts of difficulties with math. Not the least of which is arithmetic among positives and negatives.

    This makes me even more excited about counting in negatives to Daughter.

    Counting in negatives shows order.

    You may not need 61 seconds of anything. But you can count from negative 5 to positive 5. The point in the counting of negatives is to introduce the order of the numbers – since negatives seem to go “backwards” when you list them in order.

    And you can introduce distances with counting. You can show how distance is different than the number of points. Counting from -5 to +5 is actually 11 numbers. In this video you can see how I “rediscovered” this and then explained it:

    Parents often focus on the alphabet and reading in the very early years. There’s some neglect of math things outside of counting to 10 (starting at 1). You can do so much with counting – counting negatives, counting distances, skip counting (2, 4, 6, 8, etc.), finger counting, counting backwards.

    Counting is the foundation of all of math. And there’s tons of fun ways to use it in the early years.

    Share your ideas about counting in the comments below!

    Related articles