I have it on good authority that by the end of next year Briana will need to recognize all of her numbers up to 10, which made me realize that I haven’t done much math with the kids yet. I can’t believe it! I LOVE math! No really. I LOVE math! It’s like a puzzle with a definitive answer and you just have to move the pieces around to find it. I’ll even share a little secret with those of you who don’t know this. I was a mathlete growing up. Yes, an “athlete” that competed in math competitions. Hey, I was a real athlete/ volleyball, gymnastics, softball, basketball, and soccer player too, though in all honesty I was probably a better mathlete as a kid. Until I had kids, I still judged the local MathCounts competition to pick the kids for regionals. No teasing me!
Well, it’s time to right my wrong. We’re going to spend the week looking at numbers in three separate ways:
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NUMBER 1:
Briana is very excited that she can now “read”…in quotes only because it’s not like she can sit down with a book yet, but she can sound out lots of single words. As such, when we drive now, I do so with a low level of panic at all times because she sees signs that she just has to read right now and if I don’t stop and let her read it…well, let’s just say she voices her displeasure. That’s fine at a stop sign or speed limit sign in the neighborhood in the middle of the day when there’s no traffic. It just doesn’t work when she wants to read a billboard while driving down the highway and sometimes she gets that and is fine with it and sometimes not so much. Luckily we have a long road trip ahead to see my husband’s family. I’m sure you’re wondering what all of this has to do with teaching math. Well, be patient, I’m getting there!
So I decided that one thing that is quite prevalent on the roads and that she could start reading at a glance on our road trip are speed limit signs. We’ve sounded out the words on those signs many times and talked about the numbers briefly, but most time Briana guesses a letter for the numbers or says that they must be a letter she doesn’t know yet. I am going to start familiarizing my kids with numbers via those speed limit signs.
To familiarize her with the numbers prior to the roadtrip, I just wrote the number 1 on a piece of paper and asked what number that was. To my surprise Bree said “One. But I like to write it just straight up and down, not that fancy one like you did.” Wow. She even knew 2 ways to write the number 1! Incidentally, my “fancy” way was to make the straight up and down line and add the straight base line on the bottom and the upside down v to the top, like the number 1 probably looks on your screen if blogger doesn’t change my font. Then I wrote the number 2 (curly, not like the computer screen boxy 2) and she said it was a 6. I told her, that it was a 2 and drew the 6 next to the two. “Oh, a 2 is a backward 6.” She told me. Hmm. I guess she’s right. In my poor handwriting, my 2 and my 6 do look remarkably like mirror images. Never noticed that before.
We went up to 10 with the numbers, and then I kind-of quizzed the girls flashcard style. Abby got the 2, 8, and 10 right (though she guessed 2 every time other than the 8 and the 10 so she was bound to get it so I don’t know if I should have counted that one.) Bree remembered the 1 and the 3. Sadly, I think I confused her with the whole 2/6 thing so she didn’t get either of those right the first time. Also sadly, Abby getting more right than Briana made her quite angry and she didn’t want to play numbers anymore that day.
Luckily the kids sleep or watch movies through most of the roadtrip, but whenever I can, I point out the speed limit signs and their numbers and say how fast we can go. Bree likes to talk about how fast that is, which I take as a sign that she’s at least internalizing that these images are numbers and that some are bigger than others. We will continue to play this now that we’re back in town as a new add to the Look and See Adventures.
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NUMBER 2:
For Abby, the thing to start with to gain math skills is to start associating numbers with the amount they represent. She can repeat numbers and if you start counting she can join in up to 10 most times but at this stage she’s not associating those numbers with anything.
I don’t really enjoy cooking. I know, what kind of housewife am I?! But I do love cooking with my kids and I think it’s a great way to have fun, learn about math, and, importantly, get a meal made.
Today Abby is charged with helping make “the Number Salad” for lunch. I tell her to put 1 bag of spinach in the bowl. While she does it I keep telling her that it is ONE bag of spinach. Trust me, the task takes her long enough to repeat it many times, mostly because of the spilling and the sampling of the spinach. Then I hand her the tablespoon and tell her to put 2 tablespoons of olive oil in the bowl and we talk about the number 2. We count each spoonful, “One. Two.” Next, we add 3 half teaspoons of balsamic vinegar, 4 shakes of pepper, 5 tablespoons of blueberries, 6 tablespoons of kiwi, 7 tablespoons of strawberries, 8 tablespoons of chopped grilled chicken, and 9 tablespoons of croutons. (I hope no one is counting calories!) The coup d’ grace is to toss the salad 10 full times while we count. Loudly. By the way, I wouldn’t recommend my spur of the moment recipe, but the girls and I ate it anyway.
Briana is charged with making us some lavender lemonade. I get out four lemons and we count them for Abby. Then we roll them, to make them easier to squeeze, and I cut each one in half. I show Briana the measuring cup and I point out that she needs to get the lemon juice to touch the number 2 so we know we have enough. I ask her where the number 2 is and she points to the right number on the cup. She goes to work juicing the lemons and pouring the juice into the cup and is proud to tell me when she gets enough to touch the 2. Then we do the same with different numbers, measuring out the water, sugar, and lavender syrup. In no way did we cover all of the numbers, but it is a good first start.
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NUMBER 3:
When I was a kid, I loved playing a game called Rummikub. My husband and I used to play all of the time, pre-kids, when we had frequent game nights with friends or just with each other. I hadn’t played it in years though until Abby managed to find it and dump all of the tiles everywhere. The game is a little like the card game Rummy (big surprise with the name, right?) where you have a certain number of tiles that you have to match until you get rid of all of your tiles based on number progression in one color or the same number in all of the colors. We used to play our own version with Briana when she was a little bit older than Abby is now to help her learn her colors. I make a mental note to play with Abby in about 5 or so more months.
Since Briana gets up from her nap usually about an hour before Abby, we have quiet time to play big girl games or color until Abby wakes up. I get out all of the tiles and ask Briana how we should play, with the only guidance being that we need to take turns picking up a tile and sorting them on our tile racks. Incidentally, since she can’t yet play the right way, I think it is good for her creativity and sorting skill to develop the rules herself. She decides that we should try to fill our tile racks with one color per line. Since there are four colors in the game, if you draw a tile that is in a color that you don’t need, you have to give the tile to the other person and the same thing if you have all of the tiles of that color already. So we play her way for a couple of days while I hope that she’ll get used to seeing the numbers and differentiating the shapes on her own. At the end of the game when somehow (I suggest via cheating!) she wins again, I turn all of the tiles over and we sort them, ostensibly for clean-up, by number. Then I say “Did we find all of the ones? Twos?” And so on as she helps me find all of the tiles with each number. When we dump them back into the Rummikub box, we dump first the ones, then the twos, and I ask her what comes next (although she’s fine with counting by now), then we find that pile and dump it in. She starts to recognize the number 3 quickly because she just turned 3 and is very interested in that number.
Then I propose a new way to play. “Ok, Mommy.” So I say that instead of filling each line by color, we should do it by number. So the first 3 numbers that you draw will be the numbers that you are searching for. Sounds good to Bree so we play that way. She mostly looks for the shapes she’s picked up but doesn’t talk about them as numbers so I try to not allow her to say “I got my this one.” And I correct her that she got the eight and have her repeat her sentence. “I got my eight.” Unfortunately there are 13 numbers and the double digits anger her (she was looking for 3s and a 13 came up and she was so angry to have been so close to winning). So “Mommy’s way to play is no good. I like colors.” She says. Then she jumps up and down on the bed we were playing on with a fit of giggles, destroying the current game. Oh well. There’s always tomorrow.
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By the way, we didn’t do all three of those things in one day, because I think that would be overkill. Just think of math like a fine wine that just gets better over time. Or maybe I just need some wine after our busy and loud math skills lunch today. Either way, I can tell that I’m on my way to having future mathletes! MathCounts competition 2020 lookout!
<3 Pedigreed Housewife
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