My father's daughter again. It is 5 AM and I am up writing. But the sound coming from my room is not the click click click of the typewriter (the sound of my childhood), but the quieter tap tap tap of computer keys and the purr of the computer itself. The other sounds are bird sounds, the crowing of a neighbor's rooster, and a couple of early morning birds arguing with each other. It is still dark out, and I am determined to finish the final report on the math in the orchards project before going back to New York in the middle of next week. So I got up at 5 and am now hard at work.
I am on the one hand looking at relevant research and on the other comparing it to my own experiences in the orchards. Right now I am reading and summarizing research on how children learn math. One of the most interesting articles describes a study that examined the use of games to teach four year olds "number sense." (By number sense educators mean not just the ability to count, an essentially meaningless task by itself, but an understanding of magnitude and order, the ability to recognize and number small collections of objects or marks, and the ability to count real objects accurately. ) In this study, the researchers taught 4 year olds a simple board game that used a number line. They played with each child for just a little over an hour in short sessions over a two week period. The children played one on one with an adult, and were helped by the adults to count out loud as they played. At the end of the study the children could not only count better, but they had a better sense of the order and size of numbers. 9 weeks later when they were tested again, they still showed these gains in skills and understanding!
It seems clear to me that the children made a breakthrough in their understanding of numbers. They had not simply memorized new information, but had somehow made fundamental connections. Looking at the pictures I have of our children playing games this summer, I am not surprised at this. If there is one quality that shines out of the pictures, it is the total engagement and concentration of the children. This research was with 4 year olds, but I suspect it applies to older children also. I've been looking at other studies, talking about the difficulty of engaging older children, especially those of the middle school age. In fact one of the big changes we have seen in our math game project, is that we have more and more older children who wander over to our blankets and insist on playing games. I have had to expand the whole curriculum to meet the needs of middle and even high school students.
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