by 17 people |
In a child's early years, math is actually play. Counting, stacking, sorting, and balancing are all fun activities that develop mathematical reasoning.
Don't separate math from fun. Don't kill a child's natural love of mathematical play by insisting all mathematical concepts be relegated to a textbook or a workbook once she reaches the elementary years. By using math in daily life, especially in games and playtimes, not only will your child avoid the "math dread" so many of us have, but he will also end up with proficiency in many math skills. Math will come alive and become living math.
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Learning Math Through Play
Whether it's deliberate on your part or not, these activities all benefit math comprehension. There are ideas on this list to suit everyone from preschoolers to upper elementary students.
Just look at the math display pictured below. In the eyes of a child, these are TOYS, not "math manipulatives." Do you have attractive, engaging math toys in your home? Consider the list. Most of them are inexpensive.
- sorting buttons, counting bears, or beans
- board games -- any games that require moving pieces after a roll or spin, Monopoly, Battleship
- card games -- UNO, SkipBo, War, Rummy
- math bingo
- tangrams and other shape blocks or number rods
- dice games -- Yahtzee
- following recipes while cooking
- memory -- matching the problem with its answer
- sorting pom poms or dry pasta into egg carton sections
- saving and spending money
- dominoes
- scales, tape measures, and rulers
- hundreds chart
- timers, clocks, and stopwatches
- abacus
Living Math
a Charlotte Mason philosophy
Those who homeschool with a Charlotte Mason approach often speak of living books, living science, and living math.
What is living math, anyway?
Simply put, living math is real math, used in daily life to solve actual problems or to play games. It is math outside of worksheets and textbooks and instead inside the context of solving relevant problems -- how can we double this recipe or how much money will I have to save each week to be able to buy my brother a birthday gift?
So with living math, textbooks or worksheets are never used, right? Well not exactly. As long as life is breathed into the curriculum, textbooks can still be part of a living math program. But to use a living math approach, you have to be very deliberate to add the daily use of math to solve life's problems and to have fun.
To read more about living math, download the Winter 2007 Charlotte Mason Educational Review from Childlight USA. Look for the great, 2 page article called "Making Math Meaningful" by Dr. Milton Uecker. It offers seven great strategies that you can incorporate into your homeschool math experience.
The Best Math Resource
These books are for mom or dad to plan some fun games and activities for math learning. Armed with these ideas, you won't hear groans "Oh no! Not math again!" Instead, you'll hear, "Horray! We can play a game!" Or you get a note like this one that my daughter gave me after a day when we incorporated a game from Family Math.
Family Math (Equals Series)
Amazon Price: $19.95 (as of 12/04/2009)
This book is a fantastic resource of math brainteasers, games, and activities all meant to be done by a parent and a child (or children). If you want to make math more fun, put away the textbook for a day and pull out this volume! This is the book that got me the sweet note above.
If you want to begin implementing living math, this is the ONE book I'd recommend.
More Math Resources
For Math Board Games
FREE HELPS
Helping Your Child Learn Math by Patsy F. Kanter with Linda B. Darby (Illustrated by Roberta Toth) is a modern book in the public domain. You can find it online at the US Department of Education. I've converted the main sections into PDF for easy printing.
Another version of the entire book but without the cute graphics can be found from this link at Vidya Online.
A 2004 edition of this publication is here: A Parent Handbook for Helping Your Child Learn Mathematics.
RETAIL HELPS
25 Super Cool Math Board Games (Grades 3-6)
Amazon Price: $10.87 (as of 12/04/2009)
Get kids fired up about math with this big collection of super-cool reproducible board games that build key skills: multiplication, division, fractions, probability, estimation, mental math, and more! Each game is a snap to make and so easy to play.
Practical Math Ideas from Real Moms
These blog entries from real, homeschooling moms will inspire your math learning!
- Our Journey Westward
- Graphing poll results is rather engaging anyway, but Cindy makes it even more fun by having her children create graphs with leaves, candies, and math manipulatives! Read all of her math entries for even more encouragement.
- Freedom Academy
- Tangram fun and worksheets that are so much more than just rote repetition!
- Living Math Posts at Jimmie's Collage
- These are all of my own blog posts tagged living math.
Math Education Ideas
Let's Play Math Blog
If you want something meaty, dive into Lockhart's Lament, a 25 page essay about math education. You will come away from it with a new perspective about how you were taught math and how you want to teach it to your children.
For a regular dose of living math fun, visit the Let's Play Math blog. A few of the latest entries are below.
Fetching RSS feed... please stand byLiving Math at My House
The Charts and Graphs page linked below describes and documents a way we used some living math alongside our classical music study! And we tackled fractions with loads of manipulatives and games.
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Charts and Graphs for Learning
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We were studying the instruments of the orchestra, and my daughter had an idea to make a poll of people's favorite composers to add to her lapbook . I asked her a few questions, and she said, "Wait a minute. I know just what I want. Let me go ge...
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Hands-on Fractions
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Understanding fractions is a critical foundation of math learning. But despite their daily frequency in our lives, math with fractions can be difficult to grasp. Not surprisingly, research shows that to master fractions, students need multiple opport...
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Transitioning to Living Math
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Yes, it's hard. Very, very hard to set aside the workbook and orderly math progression through an outlined curriculum and shift to what seems to be a messy, random bunch of games and hands-on activities. You love the concept of living math. You know...
Living Math Titles
These are just good books. But they happen to include mathematical concepts. So they are perfect for a living math curriculum.
For book lists of even more living math titles, visit Penny Gardner, Ohio Literacy Resource Center, McGraw Hill, or Living Math.
And for more about the use of literature in math instruction, see Mathwire.
Anno's Magic Seeds (Picture Books)
Smart Books has a lesson plan to accompany this book.
Amazon Price: $8.99 (as of 12/04/2009)
Used Price: $3.99
Grapes Of Math (bkshelf) (Scholastic Bookshelf)
Amazon Price: $6.99 (as of 12/04/2009)
Used Price: $3.85
Sir Cumference and the First Round Table (A Math Adventure)
For free lesson plans and printables to accompany many of the Sir Cumference titles, visit Homeschool Share.
Amazon Price: $7.95 (as of 12/04/2009)
Used Price: $3.14
What's Your Angle, Pythagoras? A Math Adventure
Amazon Price: $7.95 (as of 12/04/2009)
Used Price: $4.44
One Grain Of Rice: A Mathematical Folktale
Visit Teach with Picture Books blog for some great ideas for this book.
Amazon Price: $14.95 (as of 12/04/2009)
Used Price: $7.95
Homemade Math Manipulatives and Games
- Math Toolbox
- A great site for clear directions for math manipulatives from household items.
- Manipulatives
- Printable manipulatives!
- Proteacher Forum
- A discussion filled with lots of manipulative ideas.
- Math Printables for Home
- This is a "one stop" link. Here you will find loads of math printables -- times tables, pattern blocks, hundreds charts, graph paper, place value charts, graphing paper, dot paper, and much more.
- Inexpensive Math Manipulatives
- Several good ideas from A Virtuous Woman blog.
- Printable Pattern Blocks
- At the bottom of each page, it even tells you what color paper to print on!
- Printable Math Games
- Shapes, addition,and fractions are the concepts in these free .doc files which you print and use to make your own board games.
- Ready Made Game Boards
- Just print and play. This site also has printable spinner and dice patterns. Scroll down for simpler templates that allow you to be more creative.
- Houghton Mifflin Math
- This textbook company offers lots of freebies -- math references, math manipulatives, and more. These are arranged by grade level, but be sure to check several grade levels.
There are so many goodies, sometimes things are hard to find. Here's a tip -- click on a grade level, then Teaching Tools. From that page, look for Learning Tools (here's the 4th grade page as an example). That's where all the printable manipulatives and games are hidden. Look at a grade up and down from your target grade as well! - Ellen McHenry's Basement Workshop
- Free printable board games that reinforce math skills!
- Free Online Graph Paper / Grid Paper PDFs
- Free graph and grid paper PDFs. There is much more here than just tiny boxes! There are hexagons, circles, dots, trapezoids, and even more!
- Primary Mathematics Enhancement Programme
- This is a complete curriculum. Harvest some nice printable number lines, shape cards, and operation symbols from these nifty resources.
- Tangrams Resources
- Beautiful printable PDFs with both color and black and white tangram patterns. This page also includes puzzles to solve with your tangrams!
- Free Printables : SEN Teacher
- This page has some amazing math resources -- 3D shape templates, number wheels and charts, games, numeracy fans, coin games, and so much more.
Math Manipulatives
40 Easy-to-make Math Manipulatives
Amazon Price: $15.95 (as of 12/04/2009)
FRACTION STAX
Amazon Price: $22.99 (as of 12/04/2009)
Online Math Play and Tools
- Virtual Math Manipulatives
- Play online with virtual manipulatives.
- Create a Graph
- This is a sophisticated graphic program, but it's easy enough for a child to use with some adult supervision! Graphs can be saved and printed.
- Virtual Pattern Blocks
- The hands-on kind are better, but maybe you would have a need for an online type.
- Multiplication.com's Games
- Every game is meant to reinforce multiplication skills.
- Googol Power Games
- Game topics include counting & numbers, addition and subtraction, multiplication, math skills, and math facts.
- The MegaPenny Project
- An amazing resource for visualizing huge numbers using pennies. Very cool! You must visit this site with your child beside you.
- Online Tangram
- Virtual tangram puzzles -- very engaging.
Math Curricula
Research these options for a living math approach.
- Living Math Curriculum
- An amazing living books curriculum written by a homeschool mom. The book lists for these programs are extensive! If you have access to a good library, though, this would be an affordable math program.
This program is a literature based, chronologically ordered study of math history through the ages. You will still want some math games and activities to supplement this curriculum. - Math on the Level
- More of a resource book than a complete curriculum, Math on the Level shares how to teach math skills (up to the algebra level) through real life.
- Life of Fred
- A unique math approach -- a story! Read about Fred to learn math in a very engaging way.
Reader Feedback
It's time for you to leave your comment here.
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- Amy in Peru Amy in Peru Aug 19, 2009 @ 7:48 am
- Yay! I'm REALLY excited about this one! Lots of links I'll come back to... once again, I was going to blog this, but instead maybe I'll just link to you! hahah.
Amy
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- dc64 dc64 Jun 30, 2009 @ 10:44 am
- Love the ideas here. I'm homeschooling my son, and it is difficult to get him engaged when it comes to Math. I've scoured the internet looking for ways to make math fun and interesting, to no avail...until I came here. Finally, something cool and fun for him.
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Reply
- OneFootPutt OneFootPutt Apr 30, 2009 @ 8:17 pm
- Great information on starting children early with Math. I even consider games like Chutes and Ladders and Monopoly great ways to learn basic counting and counting money.
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- { jamie } { jamie } Apr 5, 2009 @ 12:14 pm
- A big help. I'm trying to incorporate more living math, & this is very helpful! http://jamiescottage.com
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- spirituality spirituality Feb 26, 2009 @ 6:17 am
- I love your homeschooling lenses :) this one has some great resources listed. And as a math teacher myself, I totally agree: make it practical. Certainly before age 6 there's no use forcing paper and pens on kids. And after that arithmetic should be complemented with practical calculations and spatial exercise (did you know PE is actually good for geometrical insight?).
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by Jimmie
Hello! I am a homeschooling, stay at home mom who loves to teach and learn. I enjoy cooking from scratch, blogging, photography, and traveling, but I...
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