Creating a Culture of Math: Books

Children love books.  Books are a window to the world greater than their own.  Within books, children can play with personas, meet friends, explore ideas, discover people different from themselves, and have great adventures.  Books can be either informative or fantastical.  Either type can be a good way to ensure math is included in your family culture.

For the youngest children, we have counting books and shape books readily available.  One of our favourites is The Very Hungry Caterpillar, by Eric Carle.  I also recommend Math Fables and Math Fables Too, by Greg Tang .  They are everywhere you can find books.  Pick one or two that your child enjoys and put it on your bookshelves, or borrow them from your local library.  Read them with your child; enjoy the story and count the pictures together. 

After counting, math books seem to vanish from the bookstore shelves.  We need to look a litte harder to find them.  After counting, children like to see numbers in use.  Some they might like include

What Have We Learned This Year?

As I complete weekly reports throughout the year, I ocassionally purposely slip in a little math, just for the record.  But really, this year, I had been feeling that we hadn't done a ton of math.  SpiderGirl never mastered the multiplication tables, worked much with area and volume, or advanced in fractions, all things that had been on her learning plan.  BatBoy has been exploring many mathematical concepts, but still, not much to go into a report.  So I thought.  When I began working on their final reports for our Distributed Learning school, I realized just how much they have learned this year.

The Little Things

Most of what we do when it comes to learning math is not blog material. Not every task contains an 'ah-ha!' moment; not every activity is new or surprising. This post lays out some of the little things we do to support mathematical thinking and learning, and some things that we don't do yet, but are in the works.

Pyramids

This week, as part of a unit on Egypt, we read Mummy Math.  It is a cute story about two kids who use their knowledge of hieroglyphics and geometry to find their way through a pyramid and into the tomb of an ancient king.

Afterwards, BatBoy got into making pyramids out of paper.

Using Math Fiction

We are fans of math fiction in this house.  This week we read Spaghetti and Meatballs for All, which is a story about a couple hosting a family reunion.

One thing I noticed about math fiction is that it is filled with many layers, which we can't expect a student to absorb all at once.  As a result, we read the book several times over many days.