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Comment by chrisstanchak | Hacker News Reader

Watch Number Blocks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPTOCwQoYR4&t=29m23s

This is how my toddlers are learning. It's really good.

I was very anti-screen time, but Number Blocks changed my perspective. My kids have really accelerated their ability to process numbers just by watching this show.

Damn, I let my kids watch Alphablocks as toddlers but I never noticed Numberblocks! At 7 and 8 they're very good readers but the older one gets bored with arithmetic homework very easily. I've failed as a parent and mathematician.

> the older one gets bored with arithmetic homework very easily

Is he/she getting bored because it's too easy, or frustrated because it's too hard? I was crazy bored with arithmetic homework and I later took 2 years of math from a local university while I was still in high school because my high school ran out of high-enough-level math classes for me. Look up the story of Gauss in elementary school for a much more extreme example.

Don't assume your kid is behind at math because they don't like arithmetic homework! They could be too far ahead! Useful links if you suspect that might be the case:

https://beastacademy.com/

https://www.singaporemath.com/

https://ssddproblems.com/

I show this to my kids constantly. I love how it plants the seeds of concepts like square numbers and divisibility in a show that is ostensibly about just addition and subtraction

I learned math in elementary school in a similar method. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuisenaire_rods

While I don't remember the colors or anything, I still visualize addition like this I think.

I had a box of these in elementary school, too. I am not great at math but these things ... I didn't get the point. They bored the hell out of me whenever we had to use them. I had some great experiences by stacking them and making jenga-like tower builds, though. I think they even came with a small booklet that showed you some basic builds. But using them to do math stuff always felt unnecessary and tedious because it was much simpler just to do it on paper or in my head.

This is how I visualize numbers. 5 and 10 are the primary blocks. 7 is a 5 with a 2 on top that could either slide off or take 3 from another number. Great to see it being taught.

We just watched their episode on zero and it was fantastic. It's a hard concept to explain and I think they did it beautifully. My toddler is addicted.

I would be more worried about my kids becoming addicted to youtube from this (at such an early age).

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