Unschooling math

Unschooling is interest based learning where children naturally learn from their environment and are trusted to learn what they need to learn to succeed in life.  Parents act as a resource person and role model to help educate their children in a respectful manner.  Unschooling will often look different with each family.  This blog includes my family's approach to the unschooling philosophy.  I will sometimes include ideas and challenges and sometimes I will include a blog of an actual day or event of our unschooling family.  Feel free to follow my blog if you would like to learn more.  Thank you for taking time to read my blog!

I have had some people ask me about how we handle math since we are using more of a child lead, interest based, unschoolng approach without structure and I wonder how they wouldn't do math.  Math is everywhere and we use it everyday with counting, telling time, keeping track of what day it is, measuring for cooking,  logical thinking, figuring a budget, building something, planning your day, looking at nature, math is everywhere.  Like many new homeschool moms, I was trying to do somewhat of a school at home approach initially where I would pick up workbooks so my son could compute 20 math problems of adding or subtracting or writing down his numbers.  He would do the workbook pages and get everything right and then I'd ask him, "what's 3+2?" and he would have no idea and I'd say, "What's 7+1?" and he would still have no clue even though he just computed a page of math problems similar to these questions.  He was doing busy work and he was not learning anything.  It was a complete waste of his time and mine.  As time progressed, I started learning more about unschooling and came across the book "Free Range Learning:  How Homeschooling Changes Everything" by Laura Grace Weldon and this was a very thorough book that included many longitudinal studies with very interesting results.  One of the studies pertained to how children learn math and it indicated that children do not need to learn formal math until 7th grade and the reason is because their brains are not developed enough to thoroughly understand math facts.  Therefore, what we would normally learn over a period of 8 years, a child could learn in a couple months and instead focus on applicable math during the elementary age as I described above with money, counting, telling time, calendars, cooking, thinking, building, etc.  This made so much sense to me, so this is what we are doing.

I taught my son to count initially by painting our finger nails and counting while it dried.  We would always count to 200.  Counting money really helped with adding and multiplying and subtracting. My son decided that he wanted to get a pet Macaw someday, so I told him he needs to count his money and he did so daily for a while.  The next step will probably involve opening a savings account for him and teaching him how to keep track of the balance.  He also helps me with cooking a lot and he can tell me which measuring cup is which and he can tell the difference between the measuring spoons just by looking at them.  He is starting to understand the concept of fractions by using measuring cups.  Today is October 16th and he asked me how many days until Halloween, so I asked him what 31-16 is and he told me it was 15.  These are just applicable day to day math challenges.

My husband loves research and did a huge research paper in grad school, so he started a research project with my son.  We obtained five hens on April fools day and now they are laying eggs like crazy, so my husband came up with the idea to record how many eggs they lay each day and this will be compared to the outdoor temperature.  I think they are planning on doing this study for a few months to a year.  So through this, my 7 year old son will learn about statistics, how to do a research study and chicken egg production. 

There are also math computer games that can be an option.  I have introduced some of them to my son, but he does not seem like he's quite ready for them yet because he does not request to play with them.  www.coolmath-games.com is one of them.  www.starfall.com also has a math section that my son enjoys playing around with.  As my son becomes more familiar with math facts and more confident with his ability, I'm sure we will find more math games for him to play with and I will be sure to share these as my children grow and learn.

So basically, time, money, calendars, cooking, building, measuring and math games on the computer are great sources of math.  As we get into the upper level math arena and the children are preparing for test such as the SAT and college entrance exams, we may explore other math resources, but for preschool and lower elementary age, these ideas work great in our unschooling family.  I also got a calculator for my son to play around with.  He will compute math problems in his head and check his answer on the calculator.  Not all parents and teachers agree with this, but it is a lot of fun for my son and learning should be fun, so I think having a calculator to play around with is a great way to encourage math in a young mind.