Ask HN: Teach a 5-year-old math and science over the summer?

Because my young kids always got suspicious when I tried to “teach” them something, I found a way to weave it into real life. One kid would ask me for 7 Froot Loops, so I’d give them 4 and ask them how many I still owe them. Or we’d be out on a drive and I’d ask them if trees are alive. Then I would be adversarial with them: “if they’re alive, why don’t they move?” “What do they eat?” The adversarial thing works really well, depending on their personality. I’d get them to do all kinds of math stuff this way.

If you’re looking for a more structured approach, I counted marbles on a carpet with one kid for a while, every night. They put up with it but pretty much hated it. I could tell the learning wasn’t super deep. When I tried that with the second one, they pretty much rolled the marbles under the furniture.

What I’ve learned about kids is they are so different that a single approach may only be optimal for 1 in 5 of them (I made up that number). Which is why I wish I could home school them, because no teacher or school I’ve found can seem to customize their lesson plan enough.

5 might be a bit too young but ...

My 8-yo son HATES math. I know a lot of kids don't like it, but this kid has a visceral disdain for it. But I know the things (video games, media, etc) he does like and I've wanted to get better at game programming for awhile, so we set aside time to design a game he can play that - don't tell him - incorporates some of the topics on his teacher's lessons for the next month (which area available via a web portal).

His job is primarily to design characters and levels (on paper) and then I implement them. Then his job is to "test" the game. He knows there's math being injected into the game and it's very simple but this is all about the process. Suddenly he can show and tell his friends he's making a game with his friends and along the way he's getting more interested in programming.

This is just one idea. It's sneaky but seems to be working for us.

This might not be the case where you are, but a common structure for Kindergarten is play-based learning. Reading up on what that entails might be interesting, and give you some inspiration for the summer - http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/kindergarten/parents-guide-play-bas...

If you're okay with incorporating screens into the learning, Khan Academy is well structured and broken down into small manageable chunks. With a 5-year-old you would likely want to do it together. Another is https://www.tvokids.com which has all sorts of video and games content for pre-school age children.

I started my oldest with doing puzzles (jigsaw) and logic-based games. He's now 8 and is very good in the math subjects. Language is less good.

For language I have him reading English-language books, that might have been a bad idea because it's his second language. He is "okay" at his native language.

His sister we did nothing with; her language skills are excellent in her native language, but she's not as good at Math as the oldest. We're not starting her reading English for at least another year.

The youngest, well, he is only starting to talk now. They take a little longer to start because they're dual language (Dutch/English).

Our 4yo loves doing "experiments":

(1) We put on safety glasses

(2) We wear latex gloves

(3) We write down what we're about to do, what we think is going to happen, and what actually happens

There's a whole genre of "home kitchen experiments for kids" books that we checked out from the library and read through and tried to pick a few.

Several are ambitious because they need some unusual reagents we didn't have in the household. But, you know it hardly matters what experiment you do as long as you're enacting the ritual and having fun doing it :)

Some favorite easy experiments:

* Mixing baking soda and vinegar

* Dissolving shredded red cabbage in boiling water, then using this indicator fluid to measure the relative pH of household stuff like pickle juice, vinegar, baking soda, etc

* Mixing solid carbon dioxide with water, soapy water, food coloring and soapy water (great when we needed to defrost the freezer and had a bunch of leftover dry ice)

* Mixing borax and glue

I have to admit that I did more of this in 2020 and a bit of 2021 when we were indoors a lot and not seeing too many people, and that once I taught the kid to read and once the weather was nice enough to go outside and do unstructured play / climbing, the formal instruction disguised as fun has kind of stalled. Right now he's really into going to the library, checking out books, carrying them to the playground, and reading them there, which I am fine with.

Some other fun things to try:

* Splitting light with a prism (large high-quality glass prisms are under $3 and under $10 on AliExpress, but buy a few as they break). Kids love seeing the rainbow on stuff. I could not quite figure out how to combine a rainbow back into a beam of white light.

* Talking about states of matter (solid/liquid/gas) and building a chart of different states of matter of different substances; also "Why Does the Sun Shine?" and "Why Does the Sun Really Shine?" because our kid loves having the secret knowledge that things can also be a plasma

* Attracting and repelling things with bar magnets; what's magnetic, what's not?

* I've trained my kids to yell "g sin theta!" when they roll down a steep ramp (pretty high compliance rate) and "I'm a pendulum!" when they're on a swing (they now love watching things swing back and forth). This is just for fun. When they're going fast/slow on a slide I've tried to remind them to think about things like how quickly things roll down a steep vs shallow hill, how friction slows them down on a slide and what makes them go faster, whether a longer pendulum goes faster or slower, whether two things of unequal weight take the same amount of time to fall when you drop them … I'm not sure it sticks but it's kind of fun

For math skills I've been working through some of the stuff in https://naturalmath.com/moebius-noodles/. The 4yo is now comfortable enough to start reading this on his own and ask to do experiments, which is nice. The authors argue that kids will get enough natural exposure to certain kinds of math skills (counting things and subitizing groups) that it's worth refocusing them on other fun insights (symmetry, finding like patterns, functions) that don't always get early emphasis.

* The 4yo loves building "function machines" (let's draw a machine that makes things twice as big!) and enjoys making sample inputs and outputs, plus chaining them together.

* My kid also really likes "doing workbooks" (Highlights and Brain Quest make Pre-K workbooks which he loves playing with) and also enjoyed it when I printed out some addition worksheets and showed him how to use a number line to add numbers. He then ... wrote his own worksheets? ("3 + 5 = ____"). OK kid. We also did a bit of work with a number line to visualize addition, then talked about subtraction, but I didn't want to go too far down this road because there's plenty of it coming in school.

It's also worth a visit to a local science museum to see if they have any demos that might be interesting.