Take him to a planetarium or dinosaur museum
Ask HN: Teach a 5-year-old math and science over the summer?
31–40 of 66 posts
Re: Ask HN: Teach a 5-year-old math and science over the summer?
#32For math: - buy a bunch of math manipulatives (number blocks, base 10 blocks, Cuisenaire rods) - watch the TV show 'Numberblocks' on Netflix or BBC (there are ~50 episodes, and you can rewatch them) - use books like Beast Academy 1A and 1B if your kid is ready - Khan Academy Kids (free app) - Dreambox (paid app: $150 for 10 years) if your kid is ready
My kid loved his Cuisenaire rods. Let me add:
- Schoolhouse Rock (songs and video): ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSRRAHvSQBo ). Related to skip-counting (counting by 2s, 3s etc), which some kids really like and you can practice anywhere you can count (count the stairs). Skip-counting leads to learning the multiplication tables (flash cards).
- Illustrated books about polyhedra. This may be a little advanced, but the pictures are nice. And it leads to Zometools ( https://www.zometool.com/ ) and software versions of the same.
- Books with number illustrations. You have to look for them ( https://designobserver.com/feature/herbert-spencer-and-the-b... ).
- Any illustrated book about symbols? I remember how my kids wanted to know the names and sounds of the IPA ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe... ). This may be just a quirk of my family tho. And it's not exactly math, but being comfortable with associating symbols with meaning might make math a little more comfortable.
This is what my kids liked, but every kid has different interests and talents and of course you should build on that. My kids weren't interesting in Lego or Erector Sets or breadboarding LEDs or shooting baskets playing with dolls. If they had been we would have done that.
It's not math, but another thing my kids liked was language-learning software like Rosetta Stone ( https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best-language-learning-softw... ).
Re: Ask HN: Teach a 5-year-old math and science over the summer?
#33Just give them some legos, knex or similar toy which will help them intuit many things about mathematics without trying to pressure them to be a top student. Show them interesting books and documentaries about animals, plants, and insects. Parental pressure to succeed is the destroyer of passion and joy in learning. Let your kids be kids and they'll learn what they need to along the way. Are they really going to star…
>Parental pressure to succeed is the destroyer of passion and joy in learning.
Bingo, bango, bongo. This is the case.
The problem is that children need structure and guidance if they're ever going to do things that aren't just mindless 'fill-time' sort of activities.
We had a hard time with our kids, because we let their interests guide their activities. The problem was - whenever they expressed an interest, external pressure and expectation is that they go ALL IN on whatever it was. Baseball? Better practice with a private coach or else they'll never make the travel team, and you'll never play for your school team at all if you don't do the travel team. Jiu jitsu? Better enroll in private lessons or else they'll never make competition, and you'll never get mat time if you don't join competition.
And it's not that the expectation was that they would immediately rise to the top and be highly competitive. It was the judgment, overt judgment and criticism from other parents when we didn't express an interest in all that nonsense.
The world for young parents is difficult, and it's easy to get sucked into the trap of 'my kid likes this so I should push them as hard as possible'. Because that's the default attitude among most people, from what I can tell.
Rant over.
To OP: If your kid expresses an interest in math/science, provide them with open-ended toys and games. If they don't and you're just doing it to raise the next Einstein, don't do it.
Re: Ask HN: Teach a 5-year-old math and science over the summer?
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a real difference between giving your kids the tools to succeed and forcing them down a narrow path. IMO, everyone should know the basics of a wide range of things from cooking to statistics. It’s just a question of diminishing returns. Failing to understand the basics of say investing is really costly even if all they do is dump 90% of their money into a low cost S&P 500 fund and forget about it that’s vast…
most people don't have enough savings for investing advice to matter. An understanding of the job market would be pretty universally useful though.
Even questions like should I buy the expensive car battery or the cheap one is an investment.
Re: Ask HN: Teach a 5-year-old math and science over the summer?
#35In my experience, choose the most loud, Novell, fast activity out there.
Keeping their attention is the biggest hurdle. Small bit-size demonstrations.
Re: Ask HN: Teach a 5-year-old math and science over the summer?
#36Because 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 real…
> so I’d give them 4 and ask them how many I still owe them That works once and then they demand all the froot loops. They might not be able to do math but they are still criminals. Jokes aside, sport is a usual goto if the kid is interested. Counting points or asking by how much the other teams is ahead.
> They might not be able to do math but they are still criminals.
> Jokes aside
Where's the joke?
Re: Ask HN: Teach a 5-year-old math and science over the summer?
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
most people don't have enough savings for investing advice to matter. An understanding of the job market would be pretty universally useful though.
Even questions like should I buy the expensive car battery or the cheap one is an investment.
true, but you were talking about investing in the financial sense before. Having good money sense should definitely be taught in school, but few will benefit from an education in investing.
Re: Ask HN: Teach a 5-year-old math and science over the summer?
#38Is it just me, or is it a little bizarre to give a 5 year old a head start on math and science? Why not just have fun with the kid?
Kids are naturally inclined to learn new things. They naturally want to explore. If you aid them in this exploration of the world, it’s not forcing education on them. My kids want to read labels and things in stores, malls and restaurants. They want to read numbers. I don’t force them. I never have. Each time they ask me a question I answer it no matter how tired I am.
I promise you every kid will have some subject they like. They will also ask questions. If they’re encouraged, they’ll want to learn more even if they’re 3 years old.
My kids learned about friction because I told my wife our car brakes need to be done. Kids asked what that means and I told them how brakes work. Then they asked why brakes make a car stop and that’s how they learned about friction. Next few days they point all things with low and high friction (socks on wooden floor was especially fun). One day the 6y casually mentioned to his friend that his cycle was slow because of friction and needed more grease.
Answer questions and get them curios. I promise you they won’t even realize it’s “teaching” and they’ll love it.
Re: Ask HN: Teach a 5-year-old math and science over the summer?
#39I wrote an app for my daughters years ago using Adobe Air and it was quite successful in the early days of the app store when it was easy to load such apps. Was really useful for my daughters as they have always excelled at math. May not be suitable for a 5 year old, but depends on the kid and parent. The idea is to provide a simple interface for learning single digit arithmetic "patterns".
The objective was to create a UI that let kids relax re: feeling the need to always find the right answer. They just need to "imagine" (right mind) the right answer and click on the answer presented. Over time associative memory response leads them to recognize the patterns for single digit arithmetic, and the "arithmetic" part of math becomes instantaneous. That makes things like factoring fractions (an early hurdle) quite a lot easier because no real thought is involved in seeing the common denominator, etc. (See the chart of one of my daughter's progress in the video below to see how she learned associatively.)
After mastering single digit arithmetic, the app allows kids to move on to seeing how the "algorithmic" approach for multi digit problems is easy. (Note: the reliance on the algo approach is very much WRONG in the current "common core" approach to math in the USA. I acknowledge the "additional understanding" provided by the common core, but I do not see the algo/memory approach as the evil many common core folks see it as.)
I knew some older kids who really hated math (middle school), and found they really struggled when asked "What is 6 x 9 ??" or any other simple arithmetic problem. Finger counting and taking 10-20 seconds for just one step in the process of doing multi-digit multiplication or division is a real hindrance which definitely keeps them from progressing/appreciating math.
Some of the older kids did work though my App, and it had a very, very positive effect. Some sampling issues re: who I knew so YMMV.
I ported the app to a pure HTML/JS app, and hope to soon release it as an Github open source app that can be run locally as a PWA. Unfortunately I am way behind getting this done. Happy to share the code via my private Github account if anyone wants to help with this relatively trivial task.
Right now it runs fine, of course, in a browser with the exception of Safari because Apple is pretty aggressive about not supporting Indexeddb for local storage. Just be sure to be aware of how all the browsers will automatically delete local storage is an app is not used within N days. Any Chrome-based browser should be fine. (The fix for Webkit is not hard as it involves a very longterm bug Apple has never address, so well understood. Again, just have not had time to get to it.)
From the early Air app (current app is very similar although there are some differences e.g. graphs). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UK3wzeGVRQ4
MathFlashApp (will be active for a few more months until Google shuts down its free Workspace users): www.mathflashapp.com
HTH, nsc
Re: Ask HN: Teach a 5-year-old math and science over the summer?
#40My take is that the biggest focus, if you want to give them a head start, should be on reading.
The most fundamental skill any elementary school child can learn is how to read. Every single thing they learn in school will at least benefit from a strong reading ability, and this goes for math and science as well.
The biggest place where young students fall down in math, is story problems, not the arithmetic itself. Being able to read a passage and correctly interpret what it is asking is far and away the most important skill a young child can acquire at that age.