The next generation of 4point0schools graph geeks
18/10/08 13:42 Filed in: Learning
My biggest challenge in working on
4point0schools.com projects is that I am also a part-time math
teacher. I work a few hours a week providing direct instruction
one-on-one and countless additional hours responding to requests
such as, "Mama, ask me some plusses like 2/3 plus 8/3." We home
school our son after trying our local school option. It didn't work
for him and it is the only school within a 40-minute drive. We have
three adults in this house long on education with different areas
of expertise. As it turns out, he's in a dream school. My problem
is I don't always get a lot of work done.
He goes through phases of focus on different areas -- reading, math, crafts, astronomy. When in a phase he is utterly obsessive (a whole lot like his mother). He's in an obsessive math phase right now.
Necessity is the mother of invention and about four weeks ago, I announced that I am training him to work in this business. He had mastered addition and subtraction (and carrying and borrowing), but he had just begun multiplication and division. My goal was to ride his obsessive wave and get him into division so that he could begin the understand what an arithmetic mean is. My thought was "If we can begin to talk about averages, we can begin to talk about data. Once he learns data, he can learn programming in C/C++."
To that end, we are in the middle of a data collection project. Fitting another theme in this household -- the baby coming in about 8 weeks -- I sorted through his newborn outfits and set aside five outfits in three sizes (0-3 months, 3-6 months, and 6-9 months) and created a scorecard for each outfit.
We are describing each outfit and scoring them on three criteria we expect are important to babies: warmth, softness, and cuteness. (OK, so the latter is not likely important to babies, but it was an additional criteria that a six-year-old would have a fighting chance of understanding.)
So far, we have rated ten of the fifteen outfits. The rating itself is going slowly. Zero-to-ten scales are absolutely inappropriate for a six-year-old by the way. I knew that but I wanted quantitative measures to help with the lesson on "averages." When we have finished scoring each set, he says, "Mama, can we please do the math part now?" I put the data into an Excel spreadsheet and also write them on paper with directions for the calculation. I then get him to do about a dozen other calculations of averages with different number sets. He keeps asking, "But what is an 'average'?" I keep saying, "A calculated middle" and give him more calculations. The concept of "division" wasn't all too apparent to him either at first, but after a week or two of examples, he was a pro (a pro for a six year old in any case).
The project is incomplete and he is now on a trip to the coast with his English teacher grandma. I'll post an update of the big baby clothing study.
He goes through phases of focus on different areas -- reading, math, crafts, astronomy. When in a phase he is utterly obsessive (a whole lot like his mother). He's in an obsessive math phase right now.
Necessity is the mother of invention and about four weeks ago, I announced that I am training him to work in this business. He had mastered addition and subtraction (and carrying and borrowing), but he had just begun multiplication and division. My goal was to ride his obsessive wave and get him into division so that he could begin the understand what an arithmetic mean is. My thought was "If we can begin to talk about averages, we can begin to talk about data. Once he learns data, he can learn programming in C/C++."
To that end, we are in the middle of a data collection project. Fitting another theme in this household -- the baby coming in about 8 weeks -- I sorted through his newborn outfits and set aside five outfits in three sizes (0-3 months, 3-6 months, and 6-9 months) and created a scorecard for each outfit.
We are describing each outfit and scoring them on three criteria we expect are important to babies: warmth, softness, and cuteness. (OK, so the latter is not likely important to babies, but it was an additional criteria that a six-year-old would have a fighting chance of understanding.)
So far, we have rated ten of the fifteen outfits. The rating itself is going slowly. Zero-to-ten scales are absolutely inappropriate for a six-year-old by the way. I knew that but I wanted quantitative measures to help with the lesson on "averages." When we have finished scoring each set, he says, "Mama, can we please do the math part now?" I put the data into an Excel spreadsheet and also write them on paper with directions for the calculation. I then get him to do about a dozen other calculations of averages with different number sets. He keeps asking, "But what is an 'average'?" I keep saying, "A calculated middle" and give him more calculations. The concept of "division" wasn't all too apparent to him either at first, but after a week or two of examples, he was a pro (a pro for a six year old in any case).
The project is incomplete and he is now on a trip to the coast with his English teacher grandma. I'll post an update of the big baby clothing study.
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