Does Your Child Hate Arithmetic?

Does  Your  Child  Hate  Arithmetic?

Arithmetic can be a problem to many pre-school children.  Unfortunately, this difficult beginning can continue through the whole math curriculum – through high school and college.  As one of the many who suffered from Math Anxiety and poor skills, here are a few pointers to help those who are still struggling.  I am not at ease in many of these operations, but at least I’m not in a panic.  However, whenever I have lunch with a friend, I have a  rough time  figuring out what my share of the bill is, unless we both ate and drank the same thing!

At a seminar last year at the CCNY School of Ed, math was defined as the study of number, quantity, shape, size, space, and their inter relationships.  Another definition described math as the searching of patterns.  It’s true that children who hate numbers have to learn to see in a different way, so here are two simple exercises that play with this type of seeing.  They  should be fun and help your child to see in a more structural manner.

Look at the pictures of flowers above.  Ask your child some questions.   “What do you see?  Are any of the shapes the same?  What makes them different?  What flower or leaf do you like the best?  Why?  If you were adding a shape, what would it look like?”  Then, encourage the child to ask you some questions.

Here is another game that was presented earlier in the blog, “Mommy, play a game with us.”  It will encourage the child to see spatially.

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Anthony and Steven are six-year-old twins.  They are playing a game with their mother, who works in Interior Design.  The boys run to the kitchen.  Mom follows.

Anthony:  Look at the floor.  It’s all squares.

Steven:  I’m going to count them.  I’ll start on the long side.

Anthony:  There are two long sides.

Steven:  Then it won’t matter what long side  I start with, will it?

Steven starts to count the square black and white tiles on one long wall of the kitchen

One, two, three, four, five…

He ends with fifteen.

Mom:  Good.  Anthony, why don’t you count the other long wall?

Anthony:  One, two, three, four…Wait a minute, Mom.  It’s going to be the same!

Mom:  Yes!  Good seeing.  I’m going to get some graph paper for us.

Anthony:  What’s that?

Mom:  You’ll see.

She runs out of the room to her brief case in the Living Room, and comes back with several sheets of graph paper, a ruler, an eraser, and three pencils.  Meanwhile, Anthony and Steven are counting the tiles along the other wall of the kitchen.

Steven:  There are only ten squares here.

Mom:  We can make a sketch of the tiles.  I do this at work a lot.  Look at these little squares on the paper and pretend it’s the floor of the kitchen.  Then, when you finish counting, I’ll draw a line to make a picture of our kitchen floor.  Here  is a pencil, Steven and Anthony.  You can make a little dot in each square when it’s counted.

Steven:  Anthony, you do the big wall, I’ll do the little wall. 

Both boys start to count the number of tiles along the side of the wall.

Mom:  I’ll help you with the dots.

She puts a dot in each square that has been counted.  When they finish, she takes her ruler and draws a floor plan of the kitchen floor.

Mom:  Look at that!  You drew our kitchen floor.  Terrific.  That’s what I do at work sometimes.

Anthony:  And isn’t it great that the two sides are the same?

Mom:  It certainly is.  We wouldn’t want a crooked floor. 

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Let me know how these worked out at Liseand@aol.com    More next time.

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