I have recently started exploring – Elementary Math Teaching. Though I am a graduate from IIT Mumbai in CSE, but my heart is always into education. So, I don’t have a corporate job experience, but have taught Science to middle schoolers for more than 5 years. The start-up I founded and ran for 7 years was also around creating Board Games which allowed learning to happen seamlessly. I continue to work in this field and lately Maths has become by area of interest. So, here I was playing some Math games/activities which the Aavishkaar team introduced to me. It took me sometime before I realized what was going on with my son(4 yrs) and nephew (5 yrs) during these activities.
My son liked counting things but often won’t tag the number and the things properly. The Ganit Mala with 200 beads, gave such a real life problem for counting, something he could touch and the quantity was large and the string made sure double counting was not happening. We used to count in the head earlier by saying the number loudly.
It took him a while to figure out the pattern that after 29 comes 30…he kept asking me what comes after 39, 49, 59, and caught up the pattern from 69…he said 70 himself. Earlier, I never got this idea of putting actual 200 things for him to count, so he can figure out the boundaries like 19, 29,…99 etc while actually counting, he can literally see the pattern here. Interestingly after reaching 100…he started counting 0,1,2,3 …and refused to say 101, 102….!
Well it took a day for him to accept that there are numbers after 100 🙂
As for my nephew, who has been introduced to multiplication and knows all the tables, was counting 1 2 3 4…when I showed him 4 dots in the 10 frames activity. I added one more dot and asked them how many dots…and he said 5. When I asked how did you arrive at it? He said he counted them. When I asked the younger one..he said 5 …and he explained 2, 2 and you added 1 more, so 5! My nephew also got the hang of finding a pattern..and started using it when I added one more dot. 6, 3+3 came the answer from him.
Ganit Mala games with my older one too gave so many opportunities for finding a number….he was forced to break a number into friendly numbers.
It was working like a charm.
What I liked about the approach Aavishkaar has towards Maths, it helped me build a REAL view of Maths, Earlier it seemed to be in books only. Here not only was it REAL but I was able to help these 2 boys build this REAL view of Maths in such a short time.
A blog by Madhumita.