by Denny Wang

Created on: April 28, 2009   Last Updated: May 19, 2009

One day, I was helping my son with his homework. One of the questions is about the pattern. There listed some numbers and let you to find the next number. When the first few are 21, 24, 27, 30, 33, and I said the next should be 36. My son asked me, why? I told him that the differences of the two numbers are 3. He asked me, I know the first few are 3, but how do you know the next will also be 3? At that time, I know I need to think about how to help children with math seriously.

Mathematics is about relationship. This includes the relationship of numbers, the relationship of sharps, and the relationship between numbers and shapes. But why math is important to us? There is the most important question: mapping from our real life to math.

Math is from the life and for the life. When ancient find problems of their life, they invented math. But most of the case currently we are doing at the reverse way: we learn math, and find that it's useful for our life. Some of the mappings are very simple. For example, when you buy something, you need to multiply the price by the number you bought, and sum the price of all good together. At last, use subtraction to work out the change you need to get. In other cases, they are not the same simple. For example, find the shortest path from home to school.

Mapping (modelling) is based on concepts. If you find that the children have problem with mapping, more or less, they are confusing about the concepts. Make of a list of concepts and you will find that there are not as much as them as you thought. Always reference this list will be helpful for children to build up their concept.

Sense of Math is the basic of this subject. It can be tread as the reverse way of mapping, because it evolves in the thinking "from the math concepts to real world." For example, addition could mean put two piles of things together, move from one point forward, a future date from now, and many things else. Have a sense of what that mean in this context is the first step of solve a problem. When you child is facing a math question, first ask them to think about what is this question about, instead of to find the solution.

After that, always encourage your children to solve a question in different ways, and find out the best way of that. Mathematic is about methods. Different methods will give different type of thinking. That will not only help with math but also the way they deal with other matters of life.

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