Homeschool Math

One thing that is so fun about homeschooling my kids is finding out,--little by little, day by day--how they think and learn and discover their abilities. So anyway, the other day my son surprised me along these lines.

For a while now he and I have been discouraged with doing math. I've taught him a few things, but I never pushed him to work hard and struggle with math in order that he would grow and learn about it for the sake of it being "good for him." I really don't like to make learning a battle. This perspective has challenged me to try and teach "creatively" and "differently" than most people. But I think every parent or teacher ought to evaluate mainstream ideas of education and perhaps even challenge age old paradigms.

Math for him has surprised me because I truly thought he was a genius when he was a baby. When he was one year old, he would build color patterns with his Duplo blocks. I thought, too, that with his dad being an engineer, he would also just "get" math and love it--that learning math would come natural for him and teaching it would be easy. But, not so. There came a day when sitting down together and working on arithmetic became an emotional struggle. Who wants to deal with that? Everyone has to learn math! But for him, computations were a challenge. He just didn't want to do the work even though I knew he understood the concepts. Hm? So my creative solution was to not do math, we'll just read about math. My hope was that stories about all-things-math (mathematicians, mathematical concepts, problem solving, logic etc.) would just inspire him to look at math in a different way; as a tool and as a game that's fun and exciting, not simply a "subject" to wrangle.

I read books like:
Go Figure!: A Totally Cool Book About Numbers by Johnny Ball (Author)
Mathematicians are People, Too: Stories from the Lives of Great Mathematicians by Luetta Reimer (Author), Wilbert Reimer (Author)
The Adventures of Penrose the Mathematical Cat by Theoni Pappas (Author)

It's been fun. We were covering the subject of math and he was enjoying the stories. But of course, I knew that eventually we would have to get down to business and do math someday. This is when the surprise came. We had just gotten back from our Oregon trip, I had tons of unpacking, I had allergies to deal with, and I needed something quick and easy for my son to work on for school. I typically do not like "workbooks". But I do have some around my house that I've acquired.

So I found a math workbook, I picked 2 pages of which he could choose to do one page--one had simple double-digit computations, the other had mixed word problems. He chose the word problems. He said he loved word problems. yeah, we'll see. He did the work and showed me the page. I was baffled. Not only did he do it all right, he did the math all in his head. I was even delighted when he begged me to let him do some more. So I agreed.

He chose another page of story problems. They were a little more challenging this time. I explained that he didn't have to work it out in his head. He could use the open space to write out the work. He did the page. I checked his answers. He did them all correctly! He was able to read the problems, decide the proper function, write out the computation correctly and solve for the answers. Wow! For me this meant that even after a year of trying something different, educationally he wasn't stunted. In fact, it turned out great.

I also learned that maybe workbooks aren't all that bad.