our nemesis: math

I'm one of those "non-math" people - I barely managed to get through math in high school and college, considered it a distraction from my "real" education and the classes I was interested in, and left math classes behind without a glance. I celebrated the day I completed my last math requirement for my college degree.

And now with homeschooling, I am tasked with making sure my daughters do not have a similar experience and grow up with a nervous tic any time they hear the word "math."

So far, I'm totally failing with Sunny and Posy. They were already saying that they hated math at age FIVE. I have no idea. I thought it was because they don't like the small motor writing - that's part of it. But then we got an online program and they don't like that either, and after 3 years of fighting about it ... we're taking a break until at least the fall.

I recently read a series of posts on the Simple Homeschool blog about math in the elementary years, and it was that beam of light from heaven with angels singing and all. THAT finally articulated what I've been trying to figure out about the subject of math since we started homeschooling. One thing that jumped out and whacked me in the face was one of the links she posted: historically, math was not introduced into education until kids were much older than it is now. Math, as an abstract concept, is not for children under the age of about ten. Their brains don't process abstracts yet. WUUUUT?!?! No wonder we've been fighting all this time. Sunny isn't even nine yet.

So while on this break, I'm doing some regrouping. I'm doing a lot of reading to figure out our next steps. I'm letting our subscription to IXL.com expire, which we've been using for math for the past 3 years. I'm not ordering new math books. We're going to just spend the rest of the year reading books about math-ish concepts (like the Sir Cumference series), playing number games, messing around with shapes and patterns, and practicing real life math things like counting money and telling time. I'm borrowing a couple of books from the Life of Fred series to check them out.

And for parental reading, here you go:

Simple Homeschool blog
A different way to look at math
Out of the box math inspiration
Read your way to a love of math
Create your own math playground

Thomas Jefferson Education
Living Math discussion and reading lists 
Math reading list for kids