This blog post is a part of a Homeschool Diversity Blog Hop Hosted by The Home Spun Life and Sweet Phenomena. We were invited to share our homeschooling style, favorite field trip places, or ideas for the new year.
I have just started a new project with my second grader Moira. She asked if she could make baked goods to sell at the farmer’s market, and I saw it as a good learning opportunity and math project for her. In previous years Moira has enjoyed juicing oranges to sell at the community garden or making memory wire bracelets to sell here an there. Her new venture is turning out to be good for not just math, but also learning new spelling words, concentration, and for following directions.
Aside from wanting to support Moira with achieving her consistent desire to start a business, I was also influenced to help her since I recently read a recent New York Times op-ed entitled How to Fix Our Math Education. In the recent op-ed authors, Sol Garfunkel and David Mumford focused on higher education math, however I am attempting to extrapolate their insights at the primary level with this new project. The authors favor a sequence of higher education math learning with “replacing the sequence of algebra, geometry and calculus with a sequence of finance, data and basic engineering.” Personally I would go further to include statistics. Notwithstanding, I agree with their conclusion as I recall ‘relearning’ certain algebra skills when I was working in a research lab at the University of Washington, and even later as I formulated my own bath and body recipes.:
A math curriculum that focused on real-life problems would still expose students to the abstract tools of mathematics, especially the manipulation of unknown quantities. But there is a world of difference between teaching “pure” math, with no context, and teaching relevant problems that will lead students to appreciate how a mathematical formula models and clarifies real-world situations.
I am not waiting to apply this type of hands on approach with Moira’s math education. She and I have both been frustrated with certain aspects of learning and teaching math respectively. In working with her in this new project she has initially come up with a cereal bar recipe that she is happy with, and that others have tested and liked. The math that she has learned or used up until this point involves understanding fractions, adding fractions, multiplying, and learning units of measurement. I usually give her the ‘wrong’ measuring cup, and she has to figure out for example how many 1/4th measuring cups she needs for 1 1/4th cups of an ingredient. Soon she will need to learn to double a batch or do more adding with fractions. She is also learning how to use a scale to weigh ingredients. As a part of calculating costs of ingredients, she is doing subtraction with or with out borrowing to determine how much of a particular ingredient that she has used from a set purchased amount of an ingredient. I will be introducing her to division as we continue with this aspect of the project. Just in the last few days of this type of work, I am seeing that her understanding of fractions and the practical work of adding fractions is coming along much easier for her. I’m excited to see how she will do with other aspects of this project such as calculating her costs, budgeting for supplies, learning to make change. I'm hoping that she can debut her new product at the upcoming Hallowgreen event at the farmer's market in Daytona Beach on October 29th. I will be definitely be there again this year with all my usual products, as well as some fun new items like this pumpkin pie soap and my aromatherapy roll ons.
Thanks for reading,
Cory Trusty
Sara
posted on Friday, October 28, 2011 1:40:12 PM America/New_York