Doing Math with Your Child: Parent Newsletter 1

Doing Math with Your Child
By Linda Levi

Here are some problems to try with your children this month. Choose a problem that you think might be appropriate for your child.

Ms Jones has 4 children. Each child has 3 stickers. How many stickers do they have altogether? (For older children try 9, 26, 149, or 247 stickers for each child.)

19 children are taking a mini-bus to the zoo. The bus has 7 seats. How many children can sit 2 to a seat and how many children have to sit three to a sit?

Leon bakes pies and sells them for $13 each. The cost of the flour, sugar, butter and cinnamon is always $2 per pie. He also has to buy 3 pounds of apples for each pie, but the price of apples varies. How much can he pay per pound for apples if he wants to make at least $5 profit on each pie?

The most important thing to remember when doing math with your child is to allow your child to solve problems in his or her own way. Since we all want to help our children learn math, it is often tempting to say, “The way you solved that problem was great, but now let me show you a faster way.” Unfortunately, this can give children the message that our strategies are better than theirs. Children will choose to use strategies that enable them to solve problems with understanding and will adopt more efficient strategies as their knowledge increases. If they are shown efficient strategies that they don’t understand, they may be able to replicate them, but this replication comes at a cost. Children might start using strategies they don’t understand. They also might develop the belief that someone else has to show them how to solve problems. Believing that you are a person who understands mathematics and can generate ways to solve problems is essential to success in the mathematics one encounters throughout life. These beliefs are crucial outcomes of our children’s elementary school mathematics education.
If you pose one of these problems to your child and she or he can’t solve it, put it aside for now. Next month’s math article will be devoted to some things you can do when your child can’t solve a problem.

Linda Levi is an Elementary School Mathematics Consultant and Researcher and Developer of Cognitively Guided Instruction. Dr. Levi has researched the factors that enable children to learn math with understanding and is currently studying how the teaching of mathematics in elementary school can prepare children for success in algebra.