A model of talking math with your kids

Christopher Danielson (@trianglemancsd) started a cool thing. It’s called “Talk Math with your Kids“. There’s a hashtag (#tmwyk) that is pretty cool to check out, too. According to Dr. Danielson “We know we need to read with our children every day, but what should we do for math? Answer: Talk about math with them as we and they encounter numbers and shapes in our everyday lives.”

I try to do this as much as I can. I have an 8-year-old, a 5-year-old, and a 2-year-old. And shapes, numbers, sorting, more, less, etc. are all things that I try to talk about with them when I can. Mostly because it is interesting to me, as a former math teacher.

Recently, I recorded one such conversation with my 5-year-old as we prepared breakfast (listen for the crackling of delicious bacon in the background.) I am submitting it as a model of how these types of conversations can look and feel.

What do you do to talk math with your kids?

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A word about fractions

This story begins with a tweet that I read.

How many cookies do you see? How did you count?#mtbos
h/t @Pierre_Tranche pic.twitter.com/J5xSm78hU2

— John Stevens (@Jstevens009) March 22, 2017

This tweet poses a nice engaging situation where addition of fractions would be a very useful tools. But, addition of fractions involves common denominators. And, then I began to remember my students attitudes toward fractions, which can be summed up by the following…

… clearly fractions are so difficult that it requires someone with the reputation of Chuck Norris to be able to deal with them effectively.

Except, they aren’t. Or maybe they are, but they certainly don’t need to be. The logic that says that 2 min + 31 sec doesn’t equal 33 of anything is perfectly understandable to most. It’s the exact same premise as requiring common denominators to complete a fraction addition problem. And THAT is confounding to many. It seems like an arbitrary rule that math teachers invented to trick students.

And the teaching of it carries with it some strong opinions, too. I remember during my undergrad, one of my professors asked this:

One of my classmates changed his major that day. He got so angry that it we would be discussing the possibility that a student could write that equation and could be thinking something mathematically accurate. Dude literally stormed out of class and I never saw him again.

It is possible, by the way:

@hs_math_phys Nope! May describe a situation explicitly (1 of 2 voted in A and 1 of 2 voted in B so 2 out of 4 voted). No silly math here!

— Melinda Waffle (@icmcwaffle) March 22, 2017

About the same time I was reading the IES Practice Guide for teaching Fractions. Are you familiar with the IES Practice Guides for mathematics? The Institute for Educational Studies gathers high quality research studies on educational and catalogs them in the What Works Clearinghouse.

The Practice Guides are documents that synthesize the multiple research studies that exists on a certain subject and operationalize the findings. Recently, I explored the IES Practice Guide for Fraction Instruction K-8.

I’d encourage you to check it out. To summarize, making fractions and conversations about portioning and sharing things a common part of math conversation from the beginning can help take the natural understanding that kids have and build fractions into that context. That will give us a chance to use math talk as a tool for students to need more exact language. My preschool son right now uses “half” extremely loosely at the moment. (I’ve drank “half” my water could really mean anything quantitatively.) In order for him to effectively communicate, he’s going to need to develop a more precise definition of “half”. That will require him adding additional fraction vocab to his toolbox.

As teachers, this gives us a chance to build in some more effective language, clearly defining the fractions as numbers. As such, encouraging a lot of conceptual sense-making about the different operational quirks that are required to effectively compute when fractions are involved. (If fractions aren’t numbers, but instead are just made-up, goofy ways of writing numbers, then the rules for computing them are goofy and made-up, too.)

The practice guide provides some tangible steps to achieve this. I’d encourage you to check it out. Lots of steps forward to take in the area of student comfort and effectiveness with fractions.

Math Talk by Necessity: a 4-year-old’s story

My 4-year-old is chatty. And while he will occasionally talk to himself, he’d much rather talk to you. And to him nothing is more frustrating than not being understood.

So, he’s realized that he needs detail. Words like “lots” or “just a little” or “soon” are easily misunderstood. Like when Dad says, “Hang on, dinner will be ready soon.” He’d prefer to have a better understanding of whether you mean 30-seconds soon or 10-minutes soon.

The math teachers among us see this as adding units to your answer. We ask our students, “What was the final speed of the car?” We don’t expect them to say, “fast.” We’d prefer something like “54 m/s”. So would my 4-year-old. “Soon” is too loose a word.

Except, most of the typical units don’t mean anything to him because he is still developing his understanding of what “a mile” is. First, that it’s a unit of distance. Second, how far is one of those. These two things are essential to making meaning out of a statement like, “Well, the store is 6 miles from here.” Without those, statements like “This box is heavy. It’s, like, 6 miles!” are not uncommon around my house right now.

But yesterday, something new happened. Together, he and I made Alton Brown’s Hot Cocoa Mix . To go from ingredients to a drink, you have four units of measure. (cups, teaspoons, tablespoons, and ounces)

So, midway through as we were chatting about this and that… together making the distinction between teaspoons and tablespoons… why two cups of one ingredient looks so much different than two teaspoons of another… stuff like that. Then, we came to the part where we needed to scoop the mix into the mug and I handed him a “scooper” and he says, “I need two… two… of THESE, but I don’t know what it’s NAME is? Dad… what’s this one’s name?”

Did you catch that? There was a step forward in that.

He knew the number wasn’t enough. “Put two in there” is really easily misunderstood. That would be a problem. Two of what?

He also knew that it totally mattered what “name” he gave the scooper. If he called it “a cup”, he risked calling it the wrong thing. Two cups of mix makes a totally different amount of hot cocoa that two tablespoons. And both could be called “a scoop”. (Two scoops from the coffee can is different that the two scoops of raisins on the cereal box.)

Finally, he figured out that this thing had a name. That I knew it. That he needed to know it and that it wouldn’t work to make it up. If he is going to communicate this amount to others, he needed to know the ACTUAL name of this scooper. Not his preferred name.

There you have it. Math talk by necessity. Lends credence to the notion that if you put students in rich enough environments, you won’t have to mandate good math talk. They simply won’t be able to communicate effectively without it.

Now, we just have to deal with the fact that when Chef Alton says “two tablespoons”, Dad tries to measure accurately while the 4-year-old would prefer that mean “the maximum possible amount of hot cocoa mix that the tablespoon will transfer to the mug.”

Why I love this picture…

I want to tell you why I love this picture.

I took this picture this morning in Lansing, MI during some wonderful small group math talk. There is one device, an iPad, with an Osmo setup attached to it.

So, here’s why I love this picture.

There’s tech and…

… manipulatives and whiteboard markers and collaboration. Tech fits among the variety of tools available. It’s not the best tool unless it best supports the learning. And sometimes other tools work better. And in this case, the students were being led into learning with all the different tools.

The activity is built around the social nature of learning. 

The kids are clearly sharing their answers with each other and the teacher… there is a constant back-and-forth, sharing ideas and discussing them. They were seeing each other ideas, but…

Their strategies aren’t all the same. 

One girl is using an array. One girl is using groups of three. One girl wasn’t quite sure what to do (so it was a good thing she could see the other two girls’ work.)

The teacher’s hands are off. 

The students are doing the reaching, arranging, manipulating. Remember, the one that does the work will be the one that does the learning.

That’s why I love this picture. it captures so many wonderful things about the right kind of teaching and learning.

Excellent Classroom Action – Art and Geometry in the Elementary Classroom

I’ve written about the connections in math and art before. The visual nature of Geometry lends itself quite nicely to this. I found that the right pairing could bring in the engagement of the visual arts while maintaining fidelity to the content.

Exhibit A: Sarah Laurens, 5th grade teacher at North Elementary in Lansing. Mrs. Laurens reached out to me excitedly while I was in her building to see a math activity that she was leading her students through. They involved quilts hand sewn by Sarah’s grandma.

The activity went like this: Students were in groups of threes and fours gathered around one of grandma’s quilts. Each quilt was made of a series of geometric shapes. Sketch the primary “unit” shape of each quilt and identify each of the polygons that are contained within it. On the surface, it is a fairly simple activity, but listening to the students talk to each other.

[Students looking at the black and blue quilt above left]

Student 1: “Those are just a bunch of hexagons.”

Student 2: “Hexagon’s, no… no… those are octagons”

Student 1: “Yeah, yeah… same thing.”

Student 2: “They’re not the same, one’s got six sides and one’s got eight.”

Student 1: “Well… wait… one… two… three… four… five… six… six sides! See I told you!”

[Students looking at the purple and while quilt on the above left]

Student 1: “That’s an octagon with kites around the outside.”

Me: “Are they kites?”

Student 2: “They look like kites.”

Me: “They sure do. How many sides do they have?”

Student 1: “One… t, th, f… oh! five…. They’re pentagons!

Ms. Laurens and her students were comfortably saying and hearing words like “regular”, “tessellation”, and using definitions to make sense of what these shapes are, and using the definitions to settle disagreements (the foundations of proof…)

Interesting images like these were leading to some interesting conversations as well. I’m thinking of  a conversation I heard between two students who were trying to make sense of the shapes they were in the picture directly above to the right. They were trying to to determine if the purple section in the middle was one big shape or two smaller shapes put back-to-back.

Then after some discussion, they realized that their answer would be the same either way. (Quadrilateral was their choice for the shape name. The word “trapezoid” was getting thrown around, but the students were having to be prompted for it).

I very much enjoyed getting to see these fifth graders exploring. Ms. Laurens was excited, the students were engaged (and this was clearly not the first time they were expected to be a self-directed and collaborative).

I’m just bummed that my schedule forced me out the door before I got to see Ms. Laurens’ closure of the activity. The students were wrapping up their discussions as I had to head out the door.