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My kids are homeschooled, and I'm in charge of teaching Math, because my wife is one of those "I suck at math" people. Her parents focused exclusively on memori
by emilecantin 9y ago
My kids are homeschooled, and I'm in charge of teaching Math, because my wife is one of those "I suck at math" people. Her parents focused exclusively on memorization when they helped her with homework, and then she got a few bad teachers, so her mental models are completely off. She's getting better, but that's not really my point.
The math program I use with my kids is this one: http://www.defimath.ca/ecole-maison/ http://www.defimath.ca/ecole-maison/ (in French)
It was developed by two mathematicians who actually studied in classrooms what worked on kids when teaching math. They've come up with a method where kids learn negative numbers and multiplication _before_ learning positional numeration (numbers greater than 10, with units, tens, hundreds, thousands, etc.). I've seen first-hand how these concepts just click in my daughter's mind, and how she often comes up with the new concept herself when you introduce the prerequisites in an order that makes sense to her.
- jacobolus 9y agoThey learn about negative numbers and multiplication before they learn to count past ten? Or they just learn counting without learning how to write the numbers?
- emilecantin 9y agoThe latter. My daughter actually learned it because we mixed different learning methods early on (we don't anymore, it confused her), but you have to admit that writing numbers greater than 10 kinda involves multiplication (by powers of ten, but still), so it makes sense to learn multiplication first. Negative numbers were seen while learning addition / subtraction (the concept was basically adding a negative number), which made a lot of sense too.
- inanutshellus 9y agoThat sounds wonderful. My kids are about the right age to do this, and I'm curious, are there any English-language versions of this text?