Unschooling Math With a Six Year Old

My little J has been quite interested in math lately. Unlike W he has not had to endure me shoving worksheet after worksheet in front of him daily and so has been able to develop a natural curiosity about the world of numbers.

For the last several months he has been focusing his energy on learning to count money. Almost every day he would bring all of his money out and ask if we could count it together. And so we did…over and over and over. We also counted how many coins he had, sorted them by color and size and figured out how much he would have with “this” and the allowance he was expecting in a few days.

He’s recently discovered that there’s more to life than money and is now finding clocks, telling time and Roman numerals fascinating. Telling time I understand but Roman numerals is not something I was ever interested in as a kid. However now that I’m a grown up I’m enjoying learning them right along with him.

Here’s one of the books we’ve been reading together. I found it at a book sale cheap!

It’s so fun for me to see the boys learn and discover things they’re interested in. I really was one of those “unschooling skeptics” who thought, “What if they don’t want to learn math?” I’ll tell you what I’ve decided…lots of people don’t want to do math when you present them with an unending supply of worksheets…but math is every where and if you live and work (or play) in our society it is absolutely unavoidable and sometimes even fun to learn about!

If you know me at all you know that I’ve come a long way in my thinking (about math and about homeschooling!)

Hope you’re having a fun (and math) filled day!

Penny is the homeschooling mother of two wonderful boys (ages 8 and 6). She is passionate about living in the freedom and joy found in Christ. She loves her husband and children, homeschooling, reading, learning, and teaching kids about missions. You can read more of her ramblings at seedsanddreams.blogspot.com

3 Comments

  1. Posted June 11, 2009 at 10:51 pm | Permalink

    My kids have suddenly gotten very into the book “Math Curse” reading it (and solving the problems) over and over. It is amazing how they are naturally curious about such things–like my mathphobic daughter getting her dad to teach her all about binary and othe rnumber systems. She spent a whole day figuring out math systems from 2 to 6.

  2. Posted June 17, 2009 at 2:43 pm | Permalink

    My kids just learned Roman numerals this week! At Vacation Bible School! The theme was the early church in Rome, so one of the activities was to make an abacus and learn to count on it. When they got home, I showed them how they could make the numeral/letter with their fingers (I, V, X, etc), and they figured out how to show one to 20 (I to XX) and beyond on their hands.

    (I should probably blog that. ;)

  3. Posted June 17, 2009 at 3:11 pm | Permalink

    Isn’t it fun to see how they learn all these things on their own!

    Amanda, you should blog about that!

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