Natural interest in maths

[~*heket*~]

Share with me your childs natural interest in maths. My daughter has always hated it until this week when we began natural learning (with pointers so as not to shock her silly). She's done about 50 sudoku puzzles, made graphs on the computer, done some fractions (which I hesitated with but reaslised she wanted to do because of the institutions emphasis on fractions :blueroll), and some sums abour the sale of rabbits (we have rabbits atm ;) )

BUT that's just basing our efforts on removing her from school and wanting her to feel like she's still learning (a big worry of hers). What are the mathematical interests of the children who have never been institutionalised?

[Sarasvati]

Well Kira is only 4. But she is starting to grasp the idea of subtraction, through eating LOL. When she starts out with 4 pieces of something, and eats one, she sees that there are 3 left. Etc. Likewise there is a flash spider online that she plays with that eats flies that you create for it... she tries to keep ahead of it by creating flies as it eats one. I don't think it will be long before she understands it in a more abstract sense. I'm not sure if that constitutes "interest", but she doesn't know what "maths" is!

[esp]

ds is always measuring and counting and working stuff out. I can't even share what it is that drives him exactly except to say that he is very mathematical about how he does a lot of things.

[Beatrice]

K loves playing with manipulatives - we have Cuisenaire rods, Base-10 blocks, tesselating pattern blocks and Batty Lizards, and a couple of fractions puzzles, but we also have a random assortment of buttons, beads, things for stringing and sorting, stacking and lining up, pouring, weighing and measuring. Lots of things around the house lend themselves to being counted, added, taken away, grouped etc. She's just discovered dot-to-dots and mazes.

B plays online games which require her to accumulate points and money and scores for this that and the other. She likes sudokus, and spatial puzzles like tangrams and another three-dimensional block thingy we have. She loves cooking, doing jigsaws, and playing Monopoly and other board and card games. She's learning to knit and sew, although she's not quite at the point of following patterns herself or adapting them.

(GTG boy just bumped his head).

[Schuyler]

Share with me your childs natural interest in maths. My daughter has always hated it until this week when we began natural learning (with pointers so as not to shock her silly). She's done about 50 sudoku puzzles, made graphs on the computer, done some fractions (which I hesitated with but reaslised she wanted to do because of the institutions emphasis on fractions :blueroll), and some sums abour the sale of rabbits (we have rabbits atm ;) )

BUT that's just basing our efforts on removing her from school and wanting her to feel like she's still learning (a big worry of hers). What are the mathematical interests of the children who have never been institutionalised?

I don't know that Simon or Linnaea are that interested in maths. Not that they aren't interested in using numbers or ever avoid math due to a fear of how hard it is. But they don't see math as an independent subject. What you've written about your daughter's math suggests that she isn't "doing maths", she's playing a game, or looking at returns to a business. The fractions and the graphs sound more, as you say, worry about what an education looks like. It is fantastic to be able to see the math that is everywhere, in sudoku, in accounting, in rabbit reproductive rates ;).

Both Simon and Linnaea tally money, they do that using addition and subtraction and multiplication. They both recognize the relationship between time and distance and velocity when driving or flying or walking or biking. Last night watching Rich Hall's fishing show where he says he read in a magazine for women over 50 that a woman over 50 has a greater likelihood of being struck by lightening than finding a man to fall in love with, Rich Hall goes on to say that older woman should try and increase their likelihood of meeting a man by courting lightening strikes, both of them laughed recognizing that those statistics were about independent occurances and not statements of causality. They know relative value and can choose between two or more goods using their own measures. They read stats on weapons in games a lot and will judge the value to their characters of buying higher hitting items or higher armor class items against the money they have to spend, again, relative value. They can estimate and round up or down and do it without thinking about the rules that they are applying.

Math is a tool for them. It is a part of the rest of their day-to-day that they use without thinking about it. They use it when they count the steps from here to there, they use it when they calculate how long and how much they need to save to get that purchase they desire, they use it when they wait a friend's arrival, the minutes, the hours, the days.

That is what it looks like in our household.

Schuyler