Math Update
Much to my surprise and delight, Private One is burning through simple multiplication facts, like 9x4, 7x5, and 8x6. We have never studied multiplication tables. We have never drilled Times Tables (ack, the thought gives me the heebies from my own elementary years). We don’t sing songs that include the facts. We could. We may. But we haven’t yet, and he’s getting it. Why? How? I wondered myself. And then I thought of the way we’ve always approached numbers. No memory, not yet at least, but relationship. The way numbers fit together, work together, relate. So when I put a sheet of multiplication problems in front of him, he naturally began to group the numbers. 9x4 means 9 sets of 4, or 4 sets of 9, and he figured out the answer, he didn’t just blurt it out of his storehouse of memorization. I know, I know, there are lots of reasons to do memorization, and I’m not knocking them. But I really like that with the understanding of the relationship of the numbers themselves, no problem is off limits. It can be deduced, eventually.
I’ve never shunned using fingers, toes or anything else that can be measured or counted. I’ve purchased oodles of manipulatives for the specific purpose of seeing how it works. When we’re in the car, and talking numbers, and have an equation like 144+123, we’ve talked about several ways to go at getting the answer. You can start with the ones, and get 7 for that place in the answer, go to the tens place, and get 6, and then wind up with the hundreds being 2, so the answer is 267. You can also do something you may know, like 100+100, which of course, is 200, and then go at getting the answer for 44+23. Which could be tackled by say, if you know what 40 and 20 is, do that first, and then go after the remaining 4+7. I know, if there is carrying over, it gets a bit more complicated, but if they are seeing it in their heads, they way they are describing it to happen, they’ll be able to work through it. When faced with an equation like 9+7, if there is a blank look, I’ll advise them to go back to an equation they know immediately, like 9+1. 10! Yep, now what’s left not accounted for…which would be 6, so the answer is 16, because 10+6 is 16. And on Animal Planet’s Extreme Thinkers last Sunday, there was a math genius solving problems in his head, faster than the kids with calculators that strived to beat him, like 4,257,921 x 7,465,103 and getting right! Faster than the calculators! And how did he achieve this amazing skill? Well, lots of brain practice, love of numbers, and discovering how to visualize, use his memory, and group the numbers in relationships to each other. I don’t presume that any of our children will be performing incredible feats of math, but it was cool to see that I haven’t been just lazy with our memorization facts. That there is merit to this approach.
Basically, I just love getting affirmed in the ways in which we have often just stumbled in handling the children’s schooling. Because there are those days, I’m sure I’m setting them up for miserable failure, and the inability to estimate the total price of a box of Fruity Pebbles and a gallon of milk. Not that we buy Fruity Pebbles. That would be sugar cereal. And then I’d have to worry about their teeth rotting out.
