This week's content is provided by Malke Rosenfeld, the author of Math on the Move. If you have not yet checked out her book, do it now! From Malke:
When my daughter was six she was prone to spontaneous bursts of body-based mathematical exploration. That summer we had two flower plants in our garden that she had nurtured from seed. By mid-August they had refused to blossom but were still gaining height and had become a daily source of measurement. She’d compare the plant to her own height, "The cosmo is taller than me!” As we turned toward autumn she was ecstatic to pronounce, “It's up to Papa's chin now!" Perhaps you’ve also noticed your children using their bodies to measure, make size comparisons with other objects, or track growth. Or maybe you’ve noticed them: walking a pathway along the painted lines on a basketball court crossing a tiled floor on the diagonal by stepping on all the corners, or stepping deliberately over every other floor tile in the grocery store What can we make of this kind of activity? Children naturally use their bodies as “thinking tools” to explore and make sense of the world. This is spatial thinking, a non-verbal, body-based mode of knowing and reasoning. Studies have emphasized the importance of self-produced movement in the development spatial reasoning which is strongly linked to robust mathematical thinking and problem solving. You can support the development of sturdy spatial and math skills in your children in three easy and enjoyable ways: Have conversations. Use spatial and relational words in the context of talking about everyday activities: over, under, around, through, around, above, below, etc. Pay attention to how children are using their bodies to interact with the environment, especially in new spaces. The more you notice the more you’ll see (and enjoy) your children’s body-based thinking! Play around! During a visit from a VERY tall Uncle Arlen my six-year-old noticed that he was exactly the same length as the couch! They ended up measuring the sunroom in a hilarious series of units called “Arlens.” The room was almost exactly four Arlens long. They also noticed that one “Arlen” was equivalent to two “Isobel’s” and five lengths of our unamused cat Lucy! If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us on Twitter (@TableTalkMath) or drop a comment below. Maybe you can create some of your own. If so, toss them my way and share! Thank you for taking the time to improve math fluency for children, one table talk conversation at a time.
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This week's content is provided by Jon Orr, the author of Math Before Bed (and tons of other cool ideas). If you have not yet checked out his book, do it now! From Jon: The benefits of reading stories to our children at nighttime have been shared countless times over, and for good reason. Reading improves literacy skills. Why is it that we don’t do math with our children before bed? The book Math Before Bed is a collection of prompts that can inspire mathematical discussions that you and your children can have before bed, at dinner, or anytime. Each page in this book shows you and your child a perplexing problem. Sometimes there is one right answer and sometimes there are many right answers. The purpose of each question is to generate a discussion about HOW you determined an answer. If you find one answer, try to find another. You could complete one page a night, or many pages. For example, you turn to this page: Read the prompt out loud and let your child think. He/she may say 20. Ask them to describe how they counted them. He/she may say:
The pages will prompt you to count, predict, follow a pattern, reason, and order. Get ready, snuggle up, and start the math! Read more about Math Before Bed and get the new pages over at http://mrorr-isageek.com/math-before-bed/ The book is in print and you can get a copy at cost here http://www.blurb.com/b/7431419-math-before-bed If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me on Twitter (@TableTalkMath) or comment below. Maybe you can create some of your own. If so, toss them my way and share! HOW DO YOU KNOW?
This week's contribution is from Christopher Danielson, whose work is worth diving into. Christopher has taught middle school and community college—everything from introductory fraction ideas through Calculus 2. He spent much of the last school year playing math with kindergartners. Presently on leave from Normandale Community College in Minnesota, he is a member of the teaching faculty at Desmos. He is the author of two books--Common Core Math for Parents For Dummies, and Which One Doesn't Belong? A Shapes Book. He developed and directs Math On-A-Stick, an annual large-scale family math event at the Minnesota State Fair. You can find more of his writing at his websites: Talking Math with Your Kids, and Overthinking My Teaching. From Christopher: I write a blog called Talking Math with Your Kids where I help parents support their children's math learning. For reading, we know to read out loud with our children every day. What can we do for math? Exploring answers to that question—through examples and research—is the goal of the blog. In that work, one of my favorite moves is to ask How do you know? I make how do you know? a regular part of conversations that involve numbers, shapes, and patterns. You can too, and both you and the children you're talking with will learn things as a result. Here are some examples from the blog: My nine-year old son and I were talking about baking cookies. If we needed 3/4 cup of sugar, but only had a 1/2 cup measure, how could we get what we needed? He said, You fill the measure and dump it into the bowl, then you fill the cup halfway and put that in. That's a correct answer. I asked, How do you know? and got a really lovely response. He said that he visualized it as a square. Shade half the square in, then shade half of the unshaded part, and that looks exactly like a 3/4 shaded square. My seven-year-old daughter was eating pistachios. She said that she threw out eight shells, and that this meant she had eaten four pistachios. I asked how do you know? and that opened a conversation about even and odd numbers that continued over the course of several days. A parent once reported this story to me: [My daughter] A. was making a giraffe and wanted each leg to be two wooden spools long. At first she wasn’t sure how many total she’d need, but when I asked how many a giraffe has, she quickly figured out the total was 8. Before reading the talk math with our kids stuff I would’ve probably just said yep, you got it- but we ended up having a great conversation about all the different ways you could figure that problem out. Adding this simple question: How do you know? turns out to be a powerful way to deepen and extend your mathematical table talk. Try it out and share your stories through the blog, or on Twitter (I'm @Trianglemancsd). Hopefully this week's Table Talk Math has your dinner table sharing ways in which math can serve a conversation. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us on Twitter (@TableTalkMath) or add a comment to the blog. Also, I would love to hear what you and the family came up with. Tweet, email me, or comment on the blog with the family's stories; I'll post some of my favorites. Thank you for taking the time to improve math fluency for children, one table talk conversation at a time. For previous newsletters, check out the archive each week. Header photo credit: Mads Bødker, Flickr CC BY 2.0 What fraction of the square above has been shaded in?
If it is not immediately obvious, maybe you can estimate a fraction that would be too low? Too high? The image is created by simply slicing the large square with straight lines, and invites us to think about how the various sections gain their value. This image comes from the website called Fraction Talks, or www.fractiontalks.com, where many other similar images can be found with a variety of designs. The site is curated by Nat Banting, and the goal is to encourage students to interrogate, communicate, and deepen their understanding of fractions. Tips to use Fraction Talks at home
Hopefully this week's Table Talk Math has your dinner table sharing ways in which math can serve a conversation. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us on Twitter (@TableTalkMath) or comment below. Also, I would love to hear what you and the family came up with. Add a comment, tweet, or email me the family's strategies and choices; I'll post some of my favorites. Thank you for taking the time to improve math fluency for children, one table talk conversation at a time. For previous newsletters, check out the archive each week. The entirety of this week's content was produced by Nat. Reach out to him on Twitter with your ideas at @NatBanting. |
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AuthorJohn Stevens is working to give parents ideas on how to have mathematics-based discussion at home. Archives
May 2018
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