Calculus for Kids online – Monday! Filming your children’s reactions: Newsletter April 9, 2015

Posted on April 9, 2015 by

MariaD — No Comments ↓ Tagged with: newsletter

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In this newsletter:

Join us online: Calculus for Kids course for adults+children starts Monday April 13
Spots in our Cary, NC circle starting Sunday April 12th in Cary, NC
Join the Natural Math crew: film a reaction video and be a star

Calculus for Kids online course for adults+children starts Monday April 13

Join us for an intensive 4-week course for parents or teachers with their children ages ~5 and up. We designed the course with Shelley Nash, the organizer of Monarch Academy, a homeschool group that meets online and in physical space. The materials are created by Kalid Azad from Better Explained, an online project helping to grow math intuitions, and Maria Droujkova and Yelena McManaman of Natural Math.

This is the first time we offer such a course, so we will work very closely with every participant to learn what helps you best.

In this 6-minute talk from a festival, Maria Droujkova shares some of the big WHYs behind this project.

What do you get from Calculus for Kids?

4 weeks of mentoring from Maria! (Invaluable if you really want to “do math”)
Each week you’ll have one live online class for the grown-ups, and one live online sharing session for grown-ups with kids.
Sparks to get you thinking about math before the class.
Resources after class to help you try out the Calculus activity with your children.
Access to the Natural Math online forum to ask questions, even long after the class is over.
Most importantly, you’ll get the confidence in your own ability to do math differently in your family!

Update: to get on the waiting list, email maria@naturalmath.com

Calculus for Kids math circle starting this Sunday in Cary, NC

We’ve never ran circles on Sundays before, but some people requested that day. Still, Sundays are less popular than weekdays, so we have a few spots left. Below is the information from the previous newsletter. Skip if you have already read it. But if you want to join us Sundays, starting April 12th, click here to sign up!

Here is a tiny sample of parent and teacher materials, called a Math Spark. We’ll have Sparks like that to go with every activity. The goal is to start thinking about ideas – to spark curiosity.

We will be running two math circles for children ages ~5-10 and their grown-ups in Cary, NC (conveniently close to Raleigh and Durham). The groups will meet on Sundays at 1 pm, starting April 12th and ending in May. These will be small mixed-age groups where children and adults come to have good times exploring mathematics together. Our Math Circles are for curious, inquiring, and playful families. Here is what participants get:

Children: make calculus their own by making models, doing art, sharing ideas, and seeing the world from the new (calculus!) point of view.
Parents: experience math as beautiful, useful, and fun; discuss ideas with peers; get a playful and fresh view on a key area of mathematics.
Natural Math crew: play-test our upcoming book Calculus for Kids and prepare for an online course too (coming very soon – stay tuned).

We usually take shapes at face value, as a single entity. Calculus gives us superpowers to dig deeper! You don’t just see the tree. You know it’s made of rings, and that the rings are growing. Just imagine having X-Ray vision to use at will. That’s what our calculus is about!

Calculus for Kids is not just for children – it’s for parents and teachers too.

We will only have 8 children in each circle, so if you want to participate, sign up soon. If the space runs out by the time you try to register, email maria@naturalmath.com to get on the waiting list.

Update: the circle is full.

Join the Natural Math crew

We are growing. Join our adventures!

Video is one of the most requested things on Natural Math, but we haven’t done much of it. What videos do people want? Children doing Natural Math activities, and grown-ups showing what children’s actions mean.

One big change activities bring is that children “grow their math eyes” and start seeing mathematics everywhere. We want to capture that in a short reaction video. If you and your children want to be stars in our video, do this:

Together with children, do a short activity about fractals and film it.
Together with children, watch the video Cows&Cows&Cows (original or Minecraft version) and film reactions.
Send us both videos.

We will give you more tips if you volunteer.

Here is a “kids react” video (not ours) so you have a sample of what we mean.