Math does not come naturally to me. Never has.
So now that I find myself in the position of actually imparting what I know about math onto someone else, I try my very best to follow the book, get out of the way and let somebody else handle the "whys" and the "hows."
I get Liliana through a week's worth of math lessons in her workbook. Then, at least once every week, Nick, who describes all levels of math as "fun" sits down with our daughter and smooths out any rough spots we've encountered. He teaches her some tricks and makes it fun for her.
When I teach math, I follow the teacher's manual to the letter, for fear of screwing something up that may prove critical at some point down through road in geometry or calculus or something.
When he teaches math, well, frankly I don't know what happens, but Lili always comes away silly and smiling and teaching me new tricks for adding two-digit numbers and she winds up crunching equations in bed at night and keeps track of them on her Hello Kitty spiral notepad.
And that is how we handle math in our home.
Oh, I can totally relate to this!
ReplyDeleteI can't wait for Chris to come home because then *he* can handle the end-of-the-day math questions at our house. Luckily, Katherine still thinks math is fun and she hasn't had any real trouble understanding the concepts, but at our parent-teacher conference yesterday her teacher was showing me a problem she'd missed and then explaining to me why I shouldn't worry that she'd missed it. The whole time I just kept nodding wisely and making understanding noises, but in the back of my mind I was secretly busy trying to figure out what the instructions even meant and how she *should've* handled that problem. I never did really get it!
By the way, L and N look so sweet in that picture! I love to see all that daddy-daughter bonding!
Sounds like a great way to learn math. I remember the boys teaching me division with piles of popsicle sticks.
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