By Barbara Bernstein, Ph.D The best thing that child care providers and parents can do to enhance young children’s mathematical abilities is to seize opportunities that come along for making mathematics a natural part of life and thinking. Once you begin to notice them, you’ll realize just how many of those opportunities there are! For example, a child can help set the table and compute how many people there will be for dinner if one family member is away for the evening, and another family is joining yours for dinner. Similarly, every time there is a snack (e.g., cookies) to share among a number of children, as in a child care setting, kids can compute how many each person gets. For example, if there are 13 cookies and five children sharing them, each person gets two and about how much extra? (Fractions can be used in the calculations when appropriate). Likewise, questions of duration may come up in ordinary discussions, such as figuring out how long a family has lived in their current home. Perhaps they moved into a new house when the oldest child in the family was four. That child is now 12. How many years ago did the family move? Holiday Fun For birthdays and holidays, children can string cards that they receive across a window or mantel. Making this decoration look even on the right and left sides (or top and bottom) could generate simple calculations. If the family is baking treats to give other children, the children could compute how many cookies are needed to give one (or two or four) to each child. Every time there is a trip to a store, children can compute costs and make change. Estimating is one kind of lesson common in schools today . Children learn reasoning and evaluating skills from such exercises as estimating how much a grocery cart filled with food will cost at the checkout counter. To do this, children have to account for the fact that meats are more expensive than starches, whether discount coupons are used, etc. My son enjoys guessing how many dollars worth of gas my gas tank will take each time we fill it up. These kinds of natural problems give children a fun feeling about mathematics which serves them well in school. Math in the News Talking about the news of the day can lead to many practical mathematics exercises, such as calculating how long the current president has been in office. Let’s say he has served one four-year term plus a certain number of years of a second term. Children can compute how many years this is. As children become older, they can compute more sophisticated things. For example, the number of people below the poverty line, or the number of people leaving the welfare rolls might come up in the news. A natural question a child might ask is, "What percent of people is that?" If they know that there are about 250 million Americans, they can make this computation roughly in their heads. Similarly, if a certain number of people are said to have asthma, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, or a certain type of car, the same question can be asked. Mathematics is a powerful thinking tool that children use quite naturally if parents and caregivers seize the practice opportunities that present themselves in the course of daily life. Barbara Bernstein received a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland’s College of
Education in 1973. She taught mathematics at Bowie State University before tutoring
students in mathematics and shepherding her own children through their educations. |
Natural Mathematics