Making Maths Real

This is a review post. See my disclosure page for more information, or check the end of this post.

I suck at maths.

Hang on, let me rephrase that…

My attitude and confidence regarding maths sucks.

Maths and number and physics type things have never been my thing. I have always regarded myself as having little to no skill in this area and avoided anything that made me test that skill. Even when I was teaching preschool, I found creating interesting and engaging maths and number activities difficult.

My problem stems from my attitude to maths. I am guessing the way it was taught – all paper and pen and rote – when I was in school just didn’t suit me. I just couldn’t wrap my head around it, it just wasn’t real or meaningful to me so I labelled it as too hard and myself as ‘not good enough’.

This is not an attitude I want for my kids, so I am trying hard not to let my loathing of maths creep into my language or behavior, and I’m always on the look out for ways to make maths come alive for my kids.

Maths should be more than just numbers on a page. Maths should be tangible, you should be able to hold maths in your hand, manipulate it, experiment with it, create with it, play with it… and understand it.

For our toddler maths is about matching and sorting, learning shapes, lining things up, beginning to count…

For my five year old maths is about experimenting with shapes, cause and effect, creating, counting in twos and tens, beginning to add and subtract…

For my nine year olds maths is about complex patterns, fractions, relationships, times tables…

My kids were given a box of beautiful Spielgaben toys to play with and explore, and the maths learning has come alive in our house.

And among all the maths and number concepts there is lots of scientific thinking, creating, sharing, working together, language development, fine motor skill, scientific thinking… These are toys that are truly ‘open ended’ and can be used in so many different ways. Watching my kids explore each set has been holistic learning at it’s best.

The Spielgaben set consists of 13 play sets of beautiful high quality, mostly wooden toys and a detailed guide with lots of ideas on how to use each set. Each set can be played with on it’s own or combined with other sets and can be used in so many different ways and by different age groups. It was originally created Friedrich Frobel, a German educator who was the founder of ‘kindergarten’.