SummerMathChallenge

I'd like to offer a summer math challenge to all of us who are hoping to help their kids stay level, or advance, in math this summer.

Singapore Math seems to be the curriculum that offers the most challenging word problems, the ones that really grow a kid's higher-level reasoning abilities. But people don't know where to start with the curriculum, and are afraid it might be too hard for them to teach.

So this summer, every day or two, Catherine and I will post a Singapore Math word problem. A day or two later, we'll post a solution. In the process, we'll talk about bar modeling, which is Singapore Math's very clever visual approach to teaching algebraic thinking.

Any kid, even a kid who is determined to spend the summer having a Good Time, can surely take the time to do one measly word problem a day, especially if he is handsomely bribed.

Our kids are 10 and 11, so we'll focus on problems that are about at their level. But we will take requests, too.

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Comments

Any kid, even a kid who is determined to spend the summer having a Good Time, can surely take the time to do one measly word problem a day, especially if they are handsomely bribed.

LOL!

I've got to go rustle up that EDUCATION NEXT article about paying kids to learn in Nigeria or somewhere. Apparently it worked.

-- CatherineJohnson - 09 Jun 2005

I'm seriously considering paying Ben, in some sense, to work on what I want him to learn this summer.

That would be math, vocabulary, and how to touch type.

It might be money; it might be video game time. He's a little bit past the age now where I could pay him in candy.

-- CarolynJohnston - 09 Jun 2005

You absolutely should pay Ben.

We've always done that, when we need to.

The summer after . . . Kindergarten??

Was that it?

We wanted Christopher to read, and he really didn't want to.

Now I realize he actually wasn't profiencent enough at that point; none of the other kids could read much at all.

We promised him he could earn a . . . game system of some kind. A Nintendo, I think.

He was so proud.

Once we heard him telling a little friend that he was 'earning' a Nintendo, and it was hilarious, because the friend had no clue what he was talking about.

-- CatherineJohnson - 09 Jun 2005

I've got to get up the energy to IMPOSE some kind of handwriting program.

This may not happen.

I had a good handwriting program going two summers ago.

-- CatherineJohnson - 09 Jun 2005

Speaking of earning things, a while ago Ben borrowed money from us for a Gameboy Advance. He took quite a while working it off, and now he has a horror of the notion of being in debt.

The whole thing, I think, worked out rather nicely.

-- CarolynJohnston - 10 Jun 2005

How about just using the advice that with a very little bit of effort, he will be far ahead of his classmates. Math is so badly taught in school that a little bit of good instruction goes a long way.

-- KtmGuest - 10 Jun 2005

Speaking of earning things, a while ago Ben borrowed money from us for a Gameboy Advance. He took quite a while working it off, and now he has a horror of the notion of being in debt.

Wow.

I should try that.

How about just using the advice that with a very little bit of effort, he will be far ahead of his classmates. Math is so badly taught in school that a little bit of good instruction goes a long way.

That is amazingly true (and I have to try to remember to pull this comment up front tomorrow).

It took me awhile to figure this out . . . and to relax a little.

But finally it dawned on me that almost anything I did was going to be an improvement (not because of curriculum in our case, but because of one bad year in school----we were trying to make up for time lost).

-- CatherineJohnson - 10 Jun 2005

The other factor i finally 'got' was that when it comes to practice and time-on-task, more is (almost always) more.

Even if I didn't know what I was doing, the simple increase in amount of time Christopher spent on math was going to help his understanding, procedural competence, and memory.

-- CatherineJohnson - 10 Jun 2005