Don't discount play

I know you're thinking, "She's always nattering on about play. Surely there isn't anything left to say at this point." Well, it turns out this is a little bit more to say. But before I do, let's talk about math.

Specifically let's talk about math and how challenging it has proven to be for K. He can do it, but each new concept is an uphill climb to conquer. I know there is a math brain in there somewhere... his visual spacial ability is uncanny... but finding it has proved challenging to all of us. Until last week, that is. As I've mentioned, G., L., and K. are working through the Key to Learning Fractions books. Doing fractions takes a lot of multiplication and division because of creating like fractions and reducing to simplest terms. Multiplication and division have been among K.'s challenges. Suddenly, it has been like a switch has flipped. He has been the first one done, his work is done correctly, and he has been happy doing it. Then on Thursday last week, K. asks if he can do another math page because he loves math. (At this point I'm kind of wondering where K. is and why the aliens took him away.) I'm happy but baffled. For a few days I was going with he had just done enough math to make sense of it all. I wasn't entirely happy with my hypothesis, but it was all I had. 

And then I happened to walk through the loft and saw this.

These are bottle caps. K. adores bottle caps and has been collecting them for quite a while. He even has other people collecting them for him. He knows exactly how many bottle caps he has and spends his days sorting and arranging them. You see, to K., these are not bottle caps but Clone Troopers (as in the Star Wars kind). I am so used to seeing them set up in all sorts of different ways that I didn't think anything about it. It didn't even come to me when earlier K. had told me how many he had. It took thinking about a question a friend had asked me about how to instill math skills in adults who didn't have them that it came to me. My suggestion to my friend is going to be that probably they don't have math skills (eg multiplication table memorized) because they were missing some key scaffolding of just sheer playing with numbers and knowing at a deep level how numbers work. For that you need play. You could use manipulatives, you could create arrays...

Arrays.

You could create arrays with bottle caps pretending they are Clone Troopers and be highly invested in how many each squadron of troops (or whatever)  had and how they fit together and how those numbers changed or didn't change. You could do this a lot so that your arrays of troops became so well known that you finally understood the idea of multiplication.

It wasn't some math switch that suddenly flipped on. It was hours (literally hours) of hands on use of manipulatives doing math over and over and over when he thought he was playing. If I could take credit with this, I would. It's brilliant. But the most I can take credit for is giving him the free time to play and not get in his business telling him what he was doing wasn't valuable. This last is more attributable to lazy parenting than anything else. Well, lazy parenting and having a little better grasp of the process of learning. 

When we focus on the end result we get tied up in knots, especially if we see our child learning differently than everyone else. I'm more relaxed and less inclined to micromanage these days. If this had been one of my older children, I probably would have stressed a great bit more and been more proactive in my interventions. (That method didn't work any better than my relaxed version. Probably worse. Sorry older children of mine.) 

Our children really do want to make sense of their world. They really do want to be successful. Play really is the best way for them to do both of these things.