Ask HN: What book did you use to teach your children math? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What book did you use to teach your children math?

12 pointssanoli13 comments

This question is obviously for the ones who either homeschooled their kids, or who did some teaching at home besides the school curriculum. I'd like to get some suggestions, opinions, etc. Thanks in advance!

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Khan academy is a great resource for your child to learn math. It was actually started with the realization that kids like to learn at there own pace, not being waited on by a tutor or teacher for them to understand the subject.

My son was homeschooled for two years and we did probably four grade levels in math with Kahn Academy and when he got back to school he got 98% in math for the first quarter, which was much better than his other subjects.

My son would have gotten nowhere with Kahn Academy on his own, he needed quite a bit of tutoring to get up to speed, but it was something I could do, and the curriculum, problem sets, and mechanisms for tracking progress are invaluable.

At what age is it appropriate to begin Khan Academy's math content?

I think any age you are comfortable with. My son's school just started using Khan Academy as a supplement. He is in second grade, but third grade math. He really enjoys it, as do I.

In 1993 my wife and I had a son, and we decided to homeschool him. I took responsibility for my son’s mathematics education. I started by collecting hundreds of used math books (and some new ones), and then I identified the best of them to use as textbooks. I discovered that most of the books were of very low quality, and that only a few of them seemed to be any good. I did not realize until my son was in college that the reason the “good” books were good was because they were based on formal mathematics.

My son did not have any noticeable talent for mathematics when he first started learning it. In fact, he was not very good at math at all. I couldn’t directly teach him math because I did not understand it very well at that time, so I had him work through some of the math books I set aside. Before he went to college, he worked through one “Saxon Math” arithmetic book, one book titled “How to Think Like a Mathematician” by Kevin Houston (which dealt with how to do proofs), and a book titled “Fundamental Mathematics” fourth edition by Wade and Taylor (which was based on 1960s New Math). Around a third of the way through the fundamental mathematics book he apparently saw how formal mathematics worked because he started being able to do mathematics quickly, accurately, and with confidence. He did not like math very much up to this point, but as soon as he was able to do math, he began to like it more and more.

Before college, my son never took even one math test. When he entered college, he majored in mathematics and physics. He was easily able to do all of the work in the mathematics and physics courses he took. This past spring he graduated with a GPA of 3.9.

Since 2008 I have been developing open source mathematics software that students can use to learn how mathematics works at a deep level. Here are some examples of what I have created so far:

http://patternmatics.org/test/expression_structure.html http://patternmatics.org/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYtsQ_PczlY http://www.mathpiper.org/

The last link is to an education-oriented computer algebra system. If you (or anyone else) is interested in learning more about this software and my thoughts on mathematics education, feel free to ask questions about it on the MathPiper developer list.

Maths for Mums and Dads:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Maths-Mums-Dads-Mike-Askew/dp/022408...

http://www.amazon.com/Maths-Mums-Dads-Mike-Askew/dp/02240863...

The Number Devil is often recommended:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Number-Devil-Mathematical-Adventure/...

http://www.amazon.com/Number-Devil-Mathematical-Adventure/dp...

How young are the children? What you can do for very young children is get some small stones and paint numbers and letters on them (use child friendly paint, obviously) and then use a toy dump truck and toy loader to move them around, and start recognising the numbers and letters, and start very simple spelling and arithmetic. Or you can paint numbers onto toy cars and use paint numbers onto a car park.

Cuisenaire rods are fun and useful.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Legler-Multiplication-Sticks-Educati...

Sometimes they come with books and you probably want to ignore most of the book. (Because knowing that green + red = blue is not useful.)

You can bulk buy dice. Chessex sometimes sell "pound of dice", and these are lovely tactile clicky clacky things. You can use these for games or rewards.

I started with this one http://www.amazon.com/Teach-Your-Gentle-Revolution-Series/dp... I liked the dots concept. My daughter is only 2 but she can count to 40 in English and 20 in French. She can do basic addition using the counting method.

We used Singapore Math and really liked it. I think of it as having all the good parts of Common Core (an emphasis on abstract thought) but without all of the crazy parts.

How old was your child when you started it?

We like the "Life of Fred" series.

http://lifeoffredmath.com/

Didn't know about this one. Seems like the storytelling aspect is pretty good. How long have you used it for?

Um... several years, but I'm not sure how many. Or, all the way from fractions up to trig. It's quirky, but the content is solid.

it doesn't matter. at the basic level, solved domain -- all that matters is that they do problems

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