Curry School professor Robert Berry offers advice for parents whose children get easily frustrated by math – or just don’t seem that excited about it.
This is a two-part series: Read Part 1
What are parents to do when their children don’t show much interest or become easily frustrated by math?
In the second of a two-part series, Robert Berry – the University of Virginia’s Samuel Braley Gray Professor of Education – answers the question. [Read the first part here.]
“I would advise caregivers to talk about mathematics with their children,” said Berry, of UVA’s Curry School of Education and Human Development. “These conversations can be about things they notice in their environments and about the mathematics that is happening in schools.”
While engaged in the conversations, Berry suggests caregivers keep these five things in mind:
• Ask, then listen. “Let your children drive the conversation,” Berry said. “When my children were younger, I would often ask them what they noticed about something in our surroundings. Sometimes these notices would be patterns of tiles, geometric configurations of materials, relationships between size and costs, and other things to get the conversations jump-started. Over time, my children would ask me about my notices and began to drive the conversation.”
No comment yet, add your voice below!