NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota State University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665

September 17, 1998

Parent Line: Grasping Math

Kim Bushaw, Parent Line Program Specialist
NDSU Extension Service

"Math is hard. I don't get this. I can't do this," Justin whines. Then moments later he explodes, "HELP ME!"

Justin's mother, Teri, tries to sit down next to her squirming fifth grader. He jumps up and heads for the snack cupboard. She lets him go, figuring that she will take a few minutes to look over the book and problems before she pulls him back to work. His tears and frustration are fully understood by his mother who feels much the same way about the subject at hand.

As Teri starts to work the problems, Justin slips off into the living room to watch TV. A full 30 minutes later Teri calls Justin back out to the kitchen table to go over her work and explain what she has done. Justin thanks his mother for her efforts, worries that the writing isn't messy enough to pass as his and then asks permission to go outside and play.

Justin's mother isn't helping produce a mathematician, but she is keeping him from frustration, at least for this one assignment. But if this pattern continues, the odds will not be in Justin's favor at test time.

Math is important to our everyday lives. How can parents and other caring adults help children get excited about math? The National Association for the Education of Young Children suggests several ways. Try a few today, a few tomorrow—make a pattern of math learning.

When we provide routines for babies and young children we build security and promote patterns. Many people function better with predictable patterns in their lives, and this is especially true for children. If you would like to test how well a 3-year-old likes routine, try to have snack before bath and then pick up toys if he is used to it the other way around.

Take time to talk about time. Even though children will not have a real concept of clock time until around age 8, preschoolers will enjoy conversations about who is younger and who is older and who is oldest in your family. A family calendar is a great way to keep track of events coming up and those that have already passed. Involve children in keeping track of special events by drawing pictures to tape to the calendar.

One dad reports that his 3-year-old is enthralled with a tape measure. The particular tape she uses is a soft plastic one for sewing. She holds the tape to a table's edge, to dolls and to her school-age siblings, who oblige her requests to measure them by laying on the floor while she stretches the tape from top to bottom. This same child plays with her own calculator. Her favorite number? You guessed it: three. Numbers that have meaning, such as the child's age or birth date, will most likely be remembered first.

Parents whose children are able to count at an early age feel they have reached a real milestone. Yet learning numbers in order is no more difficult than learning a short song or finger-play. It's when children can do some one-to-one correspondence that they are learning number-names have a purpose.

"One plate for mom, one plate for grandma, one plate for Tammy and one plate for me. That makes one, two, three, four plates!"

Children enjoy sorting and classifying things, which is probably what makes button jars, rock collections and baseball cards so popular with growing children. And as children get better at sequencing they can tell the main points of a story in order. Include children in the everyday math events that hold importance to them: weighing, measuring, cooking, counting change, shopping sales, learning their phone numbers, finding an address, estimating the size of the bowl for a leftover, setting the table, dividing food into parts, budgeting for a prom date, sorting toys into their own containers, or pricing a gallon of gas.

Whatever their age, children can learn that math is everywhere and used every day and that numbers are theirs to learn about and to use. Hopefully both parent and child will learn that math can be frustrating at times—ask people who do their own income taxes—but when the columns are tallied, it's the student who needs to understand the work.

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More than 100 Parent Line columns are in the book "Please Tell Me This is Just a Stage." To order, send $9.95 per copy to Distribution Center, Box 5655, NDSU, Fargo, ND 58105-5655.

Kim Bushaw answers the Parent Line, an information and listening support line for North Dakota parents from the NDSU Extension Service. Call the Parent Line at 1-800-258-0808 (231-7923 in Fargo) with questions about this column and other parenting topics. The Parent Line is answered 7:30 a.m. - 9:15 p.m. Monday through Thursday and 7:30 a.m. - 4:00 p.m. Friday.

Source: Kim Bushaw (701) 231-1070

Editor: Dean Hulse (701) 231-6136