Seven and eight-year-olds are making arguments. They’ll tell you something is true, and why it has to be true. More and more, they see math in the world, and they want to tell you about it.
Talking Math with Other People's Kids Month continues... A while back, Rafranz Davis reported a conversation on her blog. She writes frequently about the adventures she has with her nephew Braeden. I asked, and she gave me permission to remix a conversation she and...
Talking Math with Other People's Kids Month rolls along... Jennifer Lawler wrote up the following conversation on her blog. --- Jennifer is in the kitchen baking chocolate chip cookies when her son Ian (8 years old) wanders in and observes her methods. She has put...
WInter temperatures lead to a game. The game leads to subtraction.
There are now BIG Cheez-Its (U.S. only, it appears). The package claims that they are "Twice the size!" of regular Cheez-Its. Naturally, I bought some a few months back. I asked Tabitha (6 years old) and Griffin (8 years old at the time) what they thought. I...
"As in other areas of language development, it appears children infer the meanings of [multi-digit] numbers using whatever experiences they can access." This is one of several conclusions a group of researchers at Michigan State University and Indiana University...
I was talking with Griffin one day when he was in third grade. Me: Do you know what $latex 12\div 2$ is?Griffin (8 years old): 6Me: How do you know that's right?G: 2 times 6 is 12. Me: What about $latex 26 \div 2$?G: 13Me: How do you know...
I want to suggest a lovely post by somebody else. It is written by a math teacher who converses with his niece (who is 7 years old) about rectangles and multiplication. As an example, the rectangle below shows that 6x3 is 18. Or is it that 3x6 is 18? That...