Teach Your Child to Count
Does this look like a lot of spacecrafts to you? This is just a small part of my son’s collection. Sure does come in handy when it’s time to learn counting.
I am an anxious mom. There, I’ve said it! I fret a whole lot about my child, including whether he is learning everything he is supposed to learn. Sometimes (ok, frequently), I worry unnecessarily and prematurely. One such worry is was over the whole counting to 10 skill.
We do a lot of math, but the only counting we do is when a) we count actual objects or b) we play hide-and-seek. In both cases, we hardly ever go all the way to 10. And honestly, I really dislike anything that has to do with rot learning, including counting and alphabet songs. So we don’t do any of that. Yet ability to count to 10 is one of skills identified on the kindergarten readiness checklist.
I know I’m not the only parent out there with this problem. In fact, in one of the Moebius Noodles courses we had a parent ask this exact question:
How can I get my child to remember numbers without just forcing him to count over and over?
To begin with, singing the number song does very little for mathematical understanding of numbers. Mathematically interesting things happen when you work with quantities and lengths. For example, one of the games we played in the course was to find objects that represent quantities, i.e. 18-wheeler truck!
But the biggest thing that will help to understand past ten is actually the notion of the UNIT. This is something best explored with visual, hands-on ideas. Incorporating math into something children love doing makes teaching them counting easy and even effortless.
My son is totally into space exploration. Fortunately, many rockets and space probes we read about are numbered sequentially (think Apollo missions or Mariner space probes). So he lines up all his make-believe rockets or just cardboard boxes, numbering them sequentially, as he readies them for launch.
A related question that was also asked in the Moebius Noodles course is
How old should the child be to understand counting, to make sense of it?
How old was your child when you first introduced counting (and not just number songs)? What were some (if any) difficulties you encountered? Please share your experience.
Posted in Grow
Rube Thursday
Happy Rube Thursday, a day to celebrate Rube Goldberg machines, the over-engineered contraptions that perform a very simple task.
Have you ever seen a Rube Goldberg machine in action? They are beautiful contraptions, so you can be almost certain to find one at a museum near you. In case you want to try to build your own or get a better understanding of what goes into building one, here’s a handy reference article on Wikihow
Source: wikihow.com via Yelena on Pinterest
The over-engineered complexity of these machines is part of their attraction, but it can be very intimidating as well. Fortunately, many of these contraptions are built around marble runs. So let’s practice building a marble run. Bonus – it can be built for free out of recycling items, such as toilet paper tubes, empty bottles and rubber bands. Here’s one idea from the Clan of Parents blog:
Source: clanofparents.wordpress.com via Yelena on Pinterest
Sure, this is Christmas-themed machine, but it’s never too late for Rube Goldberg fun. Just watch this Mythbusters video with your child and get inspired.
Posted in Grow
Fun with Functions
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlO8RvA3Jb4
If you’ve been burned on school math, like I have, you might cringe at the idea of introducing functions to your child. Children don’t start studying functions until later in school. But why wait? After all, children learn about functions very early on through toys as well as daily observations. Besides, functions can be way cool or at least familiar to all involved.
Think about your dishwasher – you put dirty dishes in (input) and, after a while, take the clean dishes out (output). As long as the input is consistent and your dishwasher doesn’t break, the output will be the same – clean and dry dishes. That’s an example of a function machine that even the youngest children are familiar with and curious about.
A vacuum cleaner is another example of a function machine. If you happen to have a model that allows certain adjustments, you can make your vacuum blow air out instead of sucking it in. In which case it is a machine with an inverse function.
So there you go, these are
BIG Math Concepts
- Function
- Input
- Output
- Inverse function
- Transformation
- Result
Take a look at your child’s toys. How many of these are function machines? In my house we have a couple of marble runs, several remote-controlled cars, a no-longer-used shape sorter that makes a sound with every correct match, and many others. All these toys are function machines. I bet you have quite a few of these on the shelves and in the toy boxes.
You can also invent a machine all of your own. Sketch or build a “function machine” that takes objects in and then transforms them. Make up a rule your child will be able to guess, but not immediately. Let the child put in objects or numbers a few times to see what happens to them and to guess the transformation rule. Take turns building more machines and guessing their rules!
Experiment with functions that find correspondences:
- input: age, output: age two years ago
- input: female animal, output: male animal (mate), for example, hen-rooster, doe-buck
- input: baby animal, output: adult animal (help babies find parents), for example, kitten-cat, puppy-dog
Infants – Use qualitative functions, for example, a machine that adds a sticker to each toy the baby throws into it, or a machine that finds its mommy for each baby animal
Toddlers – Invite toddlers to change the first object and then repeat that same operation on other objects, for example, give each toy animal its favorite food (dog-bone, bird-seed, rabbit-carrot). Start using simple quantitative functions, such as the machine doubling whatever enters into it, or giving every character two raisins to eat (so, if several enter, you need to prepare enough raisins).
Older Children – Kids enjoy making up fancy machines that are hard to guess. Once you have the game going, you can play it in the car or on walks, for some oral computations. Kids may argue if the guess, “The machine doubles” is correct about their “Add the number to itself” function – help them figure out what’s going on!
Other ways to explore function machines
- Story ideas: Many fairy tales and science fiction stories have magical or mechanical objects that transform you or your stuff powerfully, for example, people turning into animals and back, cooking lots of porridge, or building palaces.
- Find function machines in everyday life. Some turn dirty clothes or dishes into clean ones, others turn cold things into hot things, or paint the object another color.
- Build the function machine that gives each animal its “house” or habitat; again, you will need pictures. A wonderful book for this activity is Mary Ann Hoberman’s “A House is a House for Me”.
- Play with the function machine that makes animal sounds for each animal that enters. You can use toys.
- The mirror machine: when the kid draws anything and inserts it into the machine, it makes the mirror image of it on the same paper.
- The upside-down machine turns everything that enters upside-down. Make sure to invite the kid to enter!
- The zero machine: a critter in the machine eats everything that comes in. Out of the machine always comes – nothing!
Hooray, functions can be fun! Have you tried finding, building or exploring function machines with your child?
Posted in Make
Rube Thursday
Happy Rube Thursday! It is a new thing I would like to start – a day to celebrate Rube Goldberg machines, the over-engineered contraptions that perform a very simple task. Think Mouse Trap game for this one. To kick off what I hope to become an online collection of Rube Goldberg machines, here’s a short video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VlEh-CPMss
Where Is Math? Tell us what you find! Here is what we see:
- Algorithms. Each machine works step-by-step, doing different but connected things at each step.
- Iterations. If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again.
- Applied math in physics: simple machines. Levers, inclined planes and more!
Send us photos and videos of your kids making Rube Goldberg machines.
Posted in Grow
