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Parental Attitudes

Parents should be included in their children’s mathematics education in a meaningful way.... Indeed, many researchers feel that it is the parents who are the single biggest factor in a child’s educational success.....

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There are effective ways that teachers and schools can forge strong links with parents that benefit all involved....as students share at home the problems that they are working on in school, parents will have their own ways of solving these problems, and these ways can be included in school discussions....

After working on the marbles problem Ms. H had three students report that they had learned another way to solve the problem at home. As one student, confided, "I showed my dad my way and he showed me his way. I didn’t understand his and he didn’t understand mine!" Ms. H capitalized on this confidence to look at what was similar between Leah’s way and her dad’s way of solving a division problem. Some of the students were able to find the link between the two methods (shown below). Other students were unsure. Ms. H pursued the comparison because she wanted to make sure that a connection was made between what was happening in her class and what parents were sharing at home. She did not want a disjunction between math at school and math at home; instead, she wanted one to strengthen the understanding of the other.

Teaching and Learning Mathematics – The Report of the Expert Panel on Mathematics in Grades 4 to 6 in Ontario, 2004