Playing, dreaming, translating: Newsletter May 30, 2013
I am Moby Snoodles, and this is my newsletter. I love to hear from you at moby@moebiusnoodles.com
Book news
Friends of the project are starting translations of Moebius Noodles into French, Turkish, Frisian and Dutch. If you can help with these languages, join our crowd-translating hub: http://crowdin.net/project/MoebiusNoodles We will copyedit translations and release them under Creative Commons open licence, just like the book.
Ask Moby Snoodles
There are a few new questions up at the Q&A hub. Check it out!
Posted in Newsletter
Free to Learn by Peter Gray: Review and Infographics
“GO TO HELL.”
Peter Gray’s book starts with a bang – Peter’s son curses his parents and educators. Peter and his wife are crying: “This time I felt, maybe, I really would go to hell.” What would send him there? The book explores the dire consequences of forcefully educating children.
(Click the images to enlarge them.)
How can we stop being complicit? The book offers several answers to this question, including modeling one’s education after hunter-gatherers tribes. Kids can find the resources to live freer lives within modern tribes, such as techie start-ups, unschooler circles, and maker communities.
One of the benefits of open education is free age mixing, a topic large enough to warrant its own map.
Peter Gray presents a five-part definition of play strikingly similar to math. It is useful for those into game design, experience design, curriculum design, and parenting.
There is a math club activity where students make “star diagrams” out of lists of what is important to them. Here is such a diagram explaining Peter Gray’s five types of play as they relate to math.
“Free to Learn” explores two venues of open education. First, democratic learning communities in freeschools such as Sudbury Valley or Reggio Emilia. Second, a style of trustful parenting and homeschooling called “unschooling” where individual families walk their own paths. Both provide the benefits of open education presented in the diagrams above.
Reading Peter Gray’s analysis of the two methods, the drawbacks are clear. In freeschools, resident teachers do not pursue their professions so that they can help children full-time. This leads to a situation where kids are rarely exposed to the projects of adults. Unschooling families can provide exposure to grown-up work. However, it is harder for individual families to maintain ongoing daily contact with a large multi-age group of kids.
Why not the benefits of both paths without the drawbacks? We need something beyond freeschools, and beyond unschooling. Let’s get to work!
Posted in Grow
Toddlers in seven-league boots
Seven-league boots is an element in European folklore. The boot allows the person wearing them to take strides of seven leagues per step, resulting in great speed. The boots are often presented by a magical character to the protagonist to aid in the completion of a significant task.
Photo credit: www.zoedevries.nl
Moby Snoodle’s friend Thys van der Veer is originally from Kimswerd, Netherlands, population 608 when Thys visits from the city. He dreams of every toddler and young kid in his village playing adventurous math games. Thys sent me the picture of Zoe in magic boots, and I added Frisian to the crowd-translation list of languages for Moebius Noodles. Let’s see what happens!
Posted in Grow
Where on Earth is Moby Snoodles? Some of this week’s travels
Here are some fine sites mentioning us this week. Nice to meet you, people of good will interested in math education! /waves
“Latest lesson” hand-picks and reviews best education content. This is what they say about our book.
Moebius Noodles: A Mathematical Playground for Young and Old
Contrary to popular belief, mathematics is not an activity that requires textbooks, calculators, and years of training. Because it consists of such fundamental notions as symmetry, classification, counting, and geometric transformations — all concepts that come naturally to even the youngest children — mathematics can truly be studied at any age. If you have picked up a copy of Math From Three to Seven and are wondering whether there is something similar for kids that are younger still, you should take a look at Moebius Noodles.
This book, the work of Yelena McManaman, Maria Droujkova, and Ever Salazar, is a beautifully illustrated collection of activities that engages young kids (even toddlers) in discovering fundamental mathematical principles and abstractions. For example, why wait until middle school or high school to learn about functions when you can think about them in any almost any context? For instance, Moebius Noodles proposes an activity where a child is given the name of a baby animal (like “kitten”) and must identify the corresponding adult animal name (in this case “cat”). The child has just created a baby-to-mother function and there are endless other possible activities that reinforce this idea of mappings between sets. The book covers basic ideas involving numbers, symmetry, functions, and even a little bit of calculus. If you’re a parent or preschool teacher interested in fun activities that involve both playing with and internalizing fundamental mathematical concepts, then Moebius Noodles is worth your time.
Love2Learn2Day is celebrating an anniversary.
#100…Math Monday Blog Hop & Giveaway!
Unbelievable! This is the 100th Math Monday Blog Hop hosted on love2learn2day.
To enter the givaway, please leave a message in the comment section below, saying why you would like to win a copy of the book. Contest open until May 28. A winner will be chosen at random and announced May 29.
A couple of comments:
Savannah from Hammock Tracks interviews Lucinda from Navigating By Joy about the living math approach to learning. It’s a detailed, thoughtful and provocative essay. A couple of quotes:
What do you see as the benefits to this learning style?
My nine year old’s answer: “I think me and [J(8)] both enjoy it more than we would if it was just textbooks. It’s really fun.” Seeing my kids enjoy maths is very important to me, but in itself that wouldn’t be enough to satisfy me that a full-time living maths approach is right for our family. What does convince me is noticing my children beginning to think like mathematicians.
What books would you recommend if someone were interested in learning more about this math learning style?
I think every homeschooler would benefit from reading Let’s Play Math by Denise Gaskins, whether or not they’re planning on doing full-time living maths. Moebius Noodles: Adventurous Math for the Playground Crowd (available from the Moebius Noodles website) also has lots of colourful inspiration. Some of our favourite read-aloud chapter books are The Great Number Rumble: A Story of Math in Surprising Places, The Adventures of Penrose, the Mathematical Cat, The Number Devil: A Mathematical Adventure and Mathematicians Are People Too: Stories from the Lives of Great Mathematicians. (We are in good company here! – MariaD)
Posted in Grow
