October 2023
Welcome to EFM's October Newsletter!
EFM: Supporting families to play, explore, and love math
It is essential that every family and caregiver in the world read books and do math with their young children!
News
Playing Cards for Educators K-3 – A shipment of these decks has arrived in the US and Australia. We look forward to getting feedback on how teachers use these in their classrooms. Even if you don’t have one of the physical decks, there are great resources for these decks on the Playing Cards Page on our site.
Second EFM / IDEMS Study in Kenya – A second study in Kenya will focus on the use of the Early Family Math app (freely available on the Google play store) by 81 families there. We will share the results when the study is over in a few months.
Donations – Last week I introduced EFM to the person sitting next to me on a plane. They were very interested and explained that their company was looking for ways to donate to charities doing educational work for low-resource communities.
If you, or a company you work for, are looking to donate to an 501(c)(3) educational charity that cares about low-resource communities, please consider EFM! We are not very good about providing ways to donate electronically, but you can always send a check, made out to “Early Family Math,” to 1402 Eolus Ave, Encinitas, CA 92024. We’ll be sure to send a nice Thank You reply, useful for your tax records.
Other Math Education News
We are happy to announce math education events related to EFM’s mission. Please send me a note describing your event.
WestEd Webinars – WestEd is presenting A Sequence of Three Webinars sharing some of their findings on play-based math and other “non-traditional” elementary math ideas.
Storybooks and Math
At first blush, reading storybooks and learning early math would seem to have little to do with each other. However, there is great value in mixing the two.
I have long been interested in the role that storybooks can play in early math education. When I first conceived of what Early Family Math might be, it was a program entirely centered around using storybooks to convey the material. The opportunity to associate math with the cozy feeling of a family reading a story together is a wonderful chance to help improve attitudes towards math.
Early reading and early math are both important and should be done together, as I have written about before. However, playing math games and solving math puzzles are essential ingredients to learning early math, and they are not naturally included while reading. So the EFM program includes storybooks, games, and puzzles. However, this newsletter will focus on the role storybooks can play.
The Many Faces of Doing Math with Storybooks
There are several ways that math and storybooks can be enjoyed together, and they are worth examining separately.
Math Stories
Biographies of Mathematicians for Children
Storybooks with Reader Guides
Storybooks with Annotations – Dialogic Reading
Storybooks with Math Talk – Math Stories in Disguise
Math Stories
Many stories incorporate math topics and have good storylines where characters solve math problems or otherwise interact with the math. There are also stories that have very minimal storylines, are not very engaging, and are essentially math primers with characters – I will not be including those, as I think your children deserve good stories.
What follows are some of the sites that have lists or collections of math stories. My apology to any sites I have inadvertently left out.
The 0 to 8 California Early Math Project has a page of Children’s Literature. It is a list of about 100 math stories. For each of these stories there are resources and activities associated with the story.
Storytelling Math is a partnership of Marlene Kliman’s group at TERC with Charlesbridge Publishing. They sponsored the creation of math stories with a diversity of cultural viewpoints, and they use authors who are members of the culture their story involves.
The UK site MathsThroughStories.org is a very large collection of math stories. They also have discussions of the books describing the plot and the math involved.
Stuart J Murphy has written 63 math stories in his MathStart series. Each book is on a specific math topic, and the books are divided into 3 levels (PK-K, 1-2, 3-4) of 21 books each.
Stanford DREME has a page they call 40 Children’s Books that Foster a Love of Math. This page has books grouped in a quick list by math topics, where each book has a plot summary and an opportunity for readers to comment.
Erikson Math has Book Ideas for Early Math Learning. These are small collections of high quality books separated into math topics, such as data collection or small numbers. It has a discussion for each book including the math involved in the story.
Biographies of Mathematicians for Children
Stories for children about mathematicians are engaging and allow children to see mathematicians as possible role models. If you search on the phrase “mathematician biographies for children” you will find a surprising number of sites with lists of such books.
Storybooks with Reader Guides
There are many organizations that provide Reader Guides for math stories and for looking at mainstream storybooks from mathematical viewpoints. These guides usually give plot summaries, a discussion of math topics related to parts of the stories, and related activities that a family can do with the stories. While I think librarians and educators can make use of these guides, I see such guides as being impractical for families and are unlikely to be used by them.
The 0 to 8 California Early Math Project listed earlier is one source of such guides. The Stanford DREME project which was also listed earlier, has reading guides for 67 books on their Reading Together Page.
Storybooks with Annotations – Dialogic Reading
Discussing a story as you read it with a child is called dialogic reading. This interactive method of reading is an incredibly valuable way to get much more out of a story and the reading experience.
Even before a child is verbal and ready for dialogic reading, an adult can use strategies for pointing and naming different aspects of what is going on in the story and on the page. For example, point to a red ball in an illustration and say “Oh look, that ball is red!” Another example would be pointing to three birds and counting “There are 1, 2, 3 birds.”
Researchers in dialogic reading often break this reading into three developmental levels:
Level 1: Asking about specific things on a page. This involves asking “wh__” questions such as what something is, what is someone doing, or who someone is. The reader can follow up a child’s answer with a simple specific question – Yes, that’s a bike, what color is it? If a child does not know the answer, simply give the answer and move on.
Level 2: Asking more general or open-ended questions about the story. This involves asking questions like What do you see on this page? or What’s happening in the story at this point?
Level 3: Building up a narrative of the story. These are questions relating to the whole story or questions that relate the story back to the child’s life.
Hold off on higher levels of dialogic reading until your child is developmentally ready for them. It is very tempting to skip quickly to level 3. Also, when giving feedback to your child, don’t expand too much on the child’s response – your feedback needs to be given in small steps.
Early Family Math has created 56 Annotated Storybooks, and each one has annotations on every page giving suggestions for discussion points and questions that can be asked. These are great starters for learning to do dialogic reading. Our storybooks are divided into three levels according to the complexity of the story and the math that is involved.
In the original version of our annotations created two years ago, the annotations on each page were just a sequence of paragraphs. The work being done by David Purpura’s group at Purdue University showed the power of giving more structure to the annotations, so we adopted their method of laying them out. You can find their six books described on their Educational Picture Books Page.
Storybooks with Math Talk – Math Stories in Disguise
All storybooks are math storybooks!
Math educators like to point out that math is all around you – the same is true for storybooks. If you use dialogic reading to discuss math things you see in the story, any storybook can become a math storybook!
A simple example is Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Not only are there three bears, there are three of lots of other things. Just as importantly for mathematics, there are lots of properties being discussed and compared – some things are small, some large, some soft, some hard, some hot, and some cold. You can ask questions like “Which bed is smallest?” and “Which bed do you think is Baby Bear’s?” All of this is a wonderful source for great math discussions!
As was mentioned at the outset, EFM likes providing dialogic reading with storybooks because it associates math with the cozy experience of reading. However, another reason we created our annotated storybooks is to help adults develop the habit of Math Talk. Math Talk refers to verbalizing to your child the math that is going on in your head all the time.
Doing Math Talk with your child in the grocery store (Please give me three apples; Which line is shorter?) or while you read (Are there the same number of beds as bears?) is just a matter of developing the habit of recognizing thoughts that are math thoughts and discussing them with your child. Adults who develop the habit of Math Talk do not spend any extra time or energy, and they make a world of difference to their young children!
If you have any questions or comments, please send them my way. I would enjoy the opportunity to chat with you. Also, if you are interested in collaborating with us or supporting us in any fashion, I would love to talk with you about ways we can work together!
Chris Wright
October 18, 2023
Chris@EarlyFamilyMath.org
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Early Family Math is a California 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation, #87-4441486.