Hey Mom, What is This?

The Wall Street Journal this morning reports the latest in math education: teach math concepts to preschoolers and kindergarteners rather than simple skills like number recognition. To me, this is another example of trying to overcome the weakness of placing young children in an incredibly sterile environment.

Because children are not in a working home, they miss the opportunity to easily learn from the world around them. Educators have to make up for this by creating pseudo learning experiences rather than the tangible, imitative learning that is most natural to children.

Let me give you an example of the latter. We missed a fair amount of planned lessons with family in town and the Thanksgiving break. But in that time, Samuel began to learn percentages, the difference between the Fahrenheit and Celsius temperature scales and adding fractions.

The percentages came from pursuing a few toys sales. What does this mean, 40 percent off? Well, a few snips with the scissors and I had 10 strips of paper and could visually show him the difference between the whole, 100 percent, and a portion of that, 60 percent.

The temperature scales came from his looking at a thermometer on the fish tank which gives both. Why does it say 27 C? A brief explanation and a few examples of typical winter and summer temperatures and Samuel began to grasp the idea of different measuring systems.

The fractions came from the ubiquitous cookies. (I'm convinced my kids will grow up thinking that "cookie" is a formal mathematical term since we use it in so many examples: you have a pile of 3 cookies here and 5 cookies here; which one would you rather have, which one is greater?) A question about halves --  can you have three halves? -- quickly led to a few paper cookies cut in half and examples of adding up fractional parts to make wholes.

By homeschooling, we can take advantage of a child's natural curiosity whether or not we are working through a set curriculum. Even better, the child doesn't have to wait until he's back in a "learning environment" to explore the concept again. If I find water on the floor, I can be sure the boys have dragged out my cup measures and gallon pitcher to re-enact the measuring exercises we did last year.

Education at its finest.