How can children teach themselves math?
This is probably one of the most asked questions of anyone involved in child-led education. If we don't force kids to sit down and do math worksheets for at least 45 minutes a day, how will they learn to add, multiply, do quadratic equations, and be successful adults?
The answer is that math is all around us, and children are interested in the things that adults do - when it's fun, when it's useful, when they want to understand how the world works.
Games are one of the best ways to promote "sticky" learning, and math is a fundamental part of many games. When my child was 4, we started playing UNO, and at first she had to master number recognition to be able to play, including knowing which way those pesky 6s and 9s were facing. Then, she quickly mastered which numbers were larger, so she would know how many points were left in her hand at the end of a round. She took so much delight in faking me out by having cards left in her hand worth only 0 or 1 point!
While I kept score, I narrated my calculations so she could see and hear how exactly I added multiple digit numbers. After a few weeks, she wanted to become the scorekeeper. (In addition to practicing adding, this got her writing more, which is not something she especially wanted to do for its own sake, but certainly wanted to do in order to keep score like a grown up.) So before she turned 5, she would routinely add two- and three- digit numbers together for fun. Along the way, she also spent several dozen hours arranging numbers on a number line, i.e. organizing her cards in number order in her hand.
When she took an interest in money, I made her a little 10-frame out of an egg carton with the end cut off, and drew up a conversion chart. Then she carefully arranged her favorite toys and some household items around the house so that I could buy them from her shop. "Shopkeeper" became a favorite game for a few months. We also had some interesting conversations about how bank accounts and credit cards work.
When my math-positive child went off to public kindergarten at a very well-regarded local magnet school, I never expected her to come home halfway through the year crying because she hated math so much. The problem was, she was bored to literal tears at having to add and subtract first up to five, and then, by the end of the year, up to 20, when she had been doing that for at least a year already. That was one of the moments that made me realize we were going to be homeschooling the following year. Because kids can only learn when they're allowed to engage with material that is accessible yet challenging, and there's no way for 25+ kids in a classroom to all be at the same level of every subject area, and kids do not learn or develop in a straight line. And because all the worksheets in the world don’t make up for genuine curiosity, and information sought out and practiced at the magical moment when children intrinsically want to learn something.
