Building a Strong Math and Science Foundation at Home

Solving Problems

First, help children of any age become good problem solvers. Here are some tips:

1. Encourage questions, particularly those that have more than one possible answer, and preferably ones to which you don't know the answer yourself. ("I'm not sure why leaves have different shapes--let's collect some and try to figure out some reasons.")

2. Ask open-ended questions and welcome innovative responses. ("What do you think these woods will look like a hundred years from now?" "What would children do if there weren't any schools and everyone stayed home and learned from a computer?")

3. Encourage divergent approaches to everyday situations, within reason. (If your child can think of a reason for setting the table in a new and different way, why not?)

4. Help your child to tolerate some uncertainty--effective thinkers can delay the best solution to a problem until they've tried out several hypotheses.

5. Provide toys and games that encourage a variety of types of play that the youngster must create himself; praise and admire innovative uses of play construction or game materials.

6. Show your child how to estimate. ("You have nine pennies in your bank--that's close to a dime." "We have to drive 295 miles to Grandmother's house; that's almost 300 miles.")

7. Practice "guess and test." ("I'm not sure what'll happen if we put lemonade in the Jell-O instead of water--let's guess some possibilities and then see what happens.")

8. Avoid using the words "right" and "wrong" unless a moral or safety issue is at stake; take time to listen to the child's ideas before passing judgment. Try out the phrase "That's an interesting idea; tell me more."

9. Work hard on helping your child feel secure enough to take sensible risks.

Practical Math and Science Learning at Home

Next, try some family activities to build numerical and scientific concepts:

Cooking offers a wealth of possibilities for understanding the important ideas of quantity, measuring, sequencing steps in a problem, following directions accurately, fractions, and testing hypotheses. It's an enjoyable, meaningful, and delicious learning experience!

Family games involving cards, numbers, or money help promote an understanding of relative quantity and build computational skills. Games requiring visual organization or strategy are also valuable.

Shopping offers chances to compare prices and shapes, learn about decimal places, and practice computation in a meaningful situation. Catalog shopping at home can become a math game--figuring out how many items can be purchased for a certain amount, for example.

Every school-aged child should have some sort of allowance to manage, however small, and gain real experience buying small items and getting change. Older children can learn how interest builds in a natural context from a bank, or if they need to borrow from the parental exchequer.

Travel activities such as license-plate bingo, keeping mileage records, or even computing gas mileage can be fun. Working with maps builds graphing and directional skills and can make a child feel very important.

Collecting inspires many budding scientists, and exploring nature with an interested adult has kindled the interest of many future biologists.

Measuring and weighing activities are appropriate even for young children. It's great fun to make diagrams of rooms in the house or maps of the yard or neighborhood. You might try introducing nonstandard measurements, such as "How many Daddy-shoe-lengths wide is the kitchen?" The Guinness Book of World Records is a rich source of relative measurements.

Using time is the best way to learn about it. Relate time to events that are meaningful for the child and use appropriate terms ("What are we doing now?"; "What will we do after/while we eat lunch?"). Pasting or drawing pictures of activities on a daily calendar while discussing past and upcoming events makes "then" and "soon" more understandable than using abstract concepts of days, weeks, months, or seasons.

Following directions is one of the most important skills learned at home. Taking steps in order, planning ahead, and talking about what to do before tackling the task can all be encouraged. Cooking (as noted earlier), treasure hunts, and building models are all sequential-step-following activities. For older children, map and compass skills are very helpful.

Calculator games are a good source of problem-solving situations with numerical concepts.

These are only a few of the multitude of activities that form the natural base of math and science learning. They are essentially about the real worldÚwhich is the best place to learn about them.