Nov 13 2008
Simplify the simple?? Let the math wars begin.
Let me start this out by informing you of a fact that everyone who knows me, including my children, know math is not my strong point. In fact, other than dealing with hard cold cash, its my weakest point. So when my 6th grade daughter comes to me and says she needs help with her math, I simply cringe and say I’ll try hun.
Today it was simplifying fractions, something I was never particularly good at. Luckily enough, my boyfriend was around, and we got help there. One down, 55 more to go. Of course, you can’t just simplify it, you have to simplify the simplify. We got to a few tough ones, and of course, there were a few trick ones. Either way, it took an hour to finish just the math homework. Then we look at the instructions again, ooops, we forgot to show our work, and back to the beginning we go.
Just when I thought we were done, in walks the fourth grade honors student, my middle son. He’s learning about decimal points, and the use of th’s, thousandths, hundreths. I sat down and helped him, and all I could think of was, we weren’t learning this stuff this early when I was a child. I remember doing fractions, at least the bigger ones, in 7th grade.
Sometimes it seems to me, we are stuffing our children so full of knowledge at such an early age, at such a fast pace, that by the time they are older, and need it, they aren’t going to remember it at all. How can they? In my daughters class, they start a topic, work on it for a day, next day is review, day after is a quiz. Her math book is as big as mine was in high school! I understand there is an expectation for our children to become smarter than we were at their age, but going at this speed doesn’t help them retain the knowledge, repetition does.
Now my first grade son, I love the way his teacher works. They start a topic, two days later introduce a topic that goes with the first, and then at the end of the week, review them both. This way, he has days of homework on both subjects, and he can start to recognize them without me pulling out the instruction books yet again.
I was playing around on Google again, and I found a site with math games for sale, I will be ordering a few for each child for Christmas. They love to play boardgames, and hopefully this will help us all in our quest for math wisdom. Even myself. Just for kicks, I’ll share with you the link,who knows, you might find something to help your young one too.
http://www.1888toys.com/
