Another mother had recommended a book she found useful in teaching maths to her (typically developing) son who’s currently in Year 3.
It is indeed a good book. It’s very easy to read and understand. Of the book’s 196 pages, I read the first 50 pages within an hour or so.
It’s not a workbook. It’s doesn’t give you lesson plans. It doesn’t contain a syllabus. It’s not a book chock full of ideas to teach maths creatively.
It’s written for the parent who “wishes to be an active participant in his or her child’s arithmetic studies”, hence the title “Arithmetic for Parents – A Book for Grownups about Children’s Mathematics”.
It’s written by Ron Aharoni, a maths professor who teaches in university. He “accepted his friend’s invitation to teach maths in elementary school as part of a project, and has since devoted much time to primary mathematics education”.
Here are some excerpts that I’d like to share:
“One of the insights I came by while teaching in elementary school is that elementary mathematics isn’t simple at all. It has depth and beauty.”
“Proper teaching of mathematics depends more on an understanding of the mathematical principles than on educational tricks. It requires familiarity with the way the fine mathematical layers lie one upon the other.”
“What have I learned? Much about teaching, about approaching children, about the way children think. I have learned about the importance of being systematic...I understood that concepts adults perceive as a whole are actually built of many small elements, one upon the other, and that you cannot skip any one of them. I learned...that explanations are usually futile in elementary school: Concepts must originate in the child through personal experience...A large part of what I learned wasn’t new facts, but something completely different: subtleties. It was like looking at a piece of cloth – from afar it seems smooth and uniform, but up close you discover that it is made of fine, interwoven threads. What I believed to be one piece turned out to consist of a delicate texture of ideas.”
“Education researchers use the term “mathematics anxiety”. There are no history anxiety or geography anxiety, but there is mathematics anxiety. Why only mathematics? The main reason lies in its layered structure: Mathematics anxiety arise when one stage is unheedingly skipped...many of the layers of mathematical knowledge are so elementary that they are often easy to miss. And when this happens, and an attempt is made to establish a new layer on top of the missing one, neither the teacher nor the student can discern the origin of the problem.”
Within a week of receiving the book, I had loaned it out to another mother who’s 12 year old child could do maths if it’s presented in numbers, but had difficulty with word problems. She found it useful too.
So if you are interested to purchase the book, (and I do highly recommend it) here are the details:
Title: Arithmetic for Parents – A Book for Grownups about Children’s Mathematics
Author: Ron Aharoni
Publisher: Sumizdat
ISBN-13: 978-0-9779852-5-8
ISBN-10: 0-9779852-5-8
It’s not carried by the major bookstore chain in Malaysia, but is easily bought through the publisher’s website: www.sumizdat.org.
It was my first time ever buying anything over the internet, so I was really anxious and paranoid! But I must say that their customer service (via email) was excellent – went out of the way to reassure me.
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