March 2024
Welcome to EFM's March Newsletter!
It is essential that every caregiver in the world reads books and does math with their young children!
EFM believes in every child’s mathematical right to equity, opportunity, and personal fulfillment.
News
EFM turns 3! Three years ago our website went live. This third year has been filled with many pleasing highlights.
Our website, www.EarlyFamilyMath.org, had about 16,000 visitors from 100 countries who made about 11,000 downloads.
For families, we have a mobile app for Android phones (soon to be available for IOS as well), and we have two decks of activity playing cards. Our Activities for Families are now available in the friendlier presentation of version 2.0.
For educators we have 200 Puzzles of the Week, 100 math games for the classroom, and two decks of puzzle playing cards (each with an associated Google/PowerPoint slide deck)..
We had about $11,000 in donations.
I want to thank all the wonderful people who have helped EFM in one form or another during this year. We have a great deal yet to accomplish, and we would love to have your help. Please join us!
How Shall We Make a Difference?
This is the question I start every EFM day with. As much as I enjoy writing up a new math game or puzzle, getting a new feature in our mobile app, or helping our translators make our material available to new communities, I keep asking what is it that we are doing or should be doing that will make a difference.
The change we want is clear: Have every family in the world do math (and reading) with their very young children. It’s right there at the top of this newsletter. Please note that this is a different goal than simply wanting every child to enter kindergarten able to count to 20 and able to add and subtract small numbers. Ours is a more holistic goal that involves improving adult and child attitudes, having families spending time together and feeling connected to their local educational resources, and it involves the child’s social-emotional learning, problem solving, and everyone’s experiencing joy and playfulness with math.
Clarence Ames, a manager at the STEM Action Center Utah, points out that 93% of US adults have had math trauma in their lives. These adults become caregivers that don’t want to have anything to do with math, and feel inadequate to do it. Clarence and his team have worked with thousands of families across Utah. In a 30 minute one-on-one meeting, they can change 95% of families with a 3-year old from “We hate math, we don’t want to have anything to do with it, we leave math to the schools” to “Math is easy, we do math all the time, math is fun.” They talk with these caregivers about the importance of math, they play a very simple game called Happy Bunny, and they describe the surprising amount of important yet simple math that is going on in the game and in the conversations they have with their child while playing it.
Clarence cites a collection of studies that have demonstrated the various parts of these prediction links:
Caregiver Attitude => Math Talk => Child Prep for K => Child’s Success
Here is more detail on each of these pieces.
1) A caregiver’s understanding of why early math is important and what it looks like will predict how much they talk to their young children about math in the home and as they go about their daily lives together. Caregivers need to believe that math is important, that they can help with it, and that their children are capable of doing it. They need to see that what they do changes outcomes and that they are in control.
2) The amount of caregiver Math Talk predicts how mathematically prepared a child is going into kindergarten. According to the studies, the kind of Math Talk is not important. What is important is the amount of Math Talk.
3) A child’s math preparation when entering kindergarten is predictive of success all through school, in all disciplines, and in many other facets of their life.
The Four Steps.
How is Clarence creating this big attitude change for these families in just 30 minutes? He describes it in terms of the first three of the following four steps.
1) Have caregivers understand how important math is to their child’s success. Numerous studies have shown the connection between math preparation going into kindergarten and later success across the board (not just in math, not just in their careers, but in many parts of their lives). Parents want the best for their children, and it is compelling to learn how central early math education is and the role they can play in it.
2) Have caregivers understand what it means to do math with their children. Unlike the message of “read with your child,” which is easily understood, the message of “do math with your child” is more complicated. Show caregivers that simple conversations involving, for example, describing things and relationships between things, is also math and those conversations make a huge difference to the mathematical development of their child. Impress upon caregivers that if they can count to 100 and do single-digit-arithmetic, they know more than enough to be heroes in their child’s early math education.
3) Have materials easily available for a family to use to make it fun to do math together. The game of Happy Bunny is not the only children’s game that involves math ideas; however, it has the big advantage that it is simple with relatively few distractions, so it is wonderful for a quick 20-minute demonstration. Early Family Math also provides a lot of fun math materials that we hope families will find engaging and enjoyable.
How do you scale up those three steps? They seem to require a personal connection, and that is something hard to scale up to the whole world. This is a big challenge! All I can say is that we are working on it! The fourth step is also very hard, and is related to the idea of personal connections.
4) Provide a social environment that encourages families to start doing math and keep doing math. People can have good intentions, but information and social support is also needed. We need to create an environment where it is as ridiculous to say “that’s okay, I was never good at math either” as it is to say the same thing about reading. We also need to connect families with other families who are doing math with their children so there is a sense of mutual connection, responsibility, and accountability.
EFM is taking steps to improve this social environment by creating mathematical playdates. The idea is to give a group of two to six families suggested math activities, such as reading annotated storybooks and playing math games and puzzles, that they can enjoy together as a group. We are currently developing this idea and looking to include it in our next version of our mobile app.
We know that playdates will not be the whole answer, but perhaps it will be a useful part of it.
Be Careful What You Wish For
Those who focus solely on numeracy for children, to the exclusion of considering other values, can end up following a dangerous path. I have heard organizations make the argument that low-resource families often have very little time to spend with their children, so let’s provide an electronic app, which is easy to deploy at scale, that a child can do by themselves that will teach them math basics.
There are a host of problems with doing this:
There are very few electronic apps that do a good job of teaching quality math. Khan Academy Kids is an example of a very well-designed app that teaches math with very little depth.
Use of these apps reduces social contact and social-emotional learning for the child.
Use of these apps further disengages the family from being involved in math, and more generally with their children.
Caregivers have no involvement with the app, so they do not change their attitude towards math.
It encourages caregivers to feel that the schools and these apps are the only adequate way for their children to begin learning math. There is no place for the caregiver.
It decreases the common ground between the caregiver and the child’s school or other learning institutions. Educators will tell you that a strong connection with families is essential for a child’s success in school.
It teaches the child that math is something done in isolation.
It is a very debatable point whether you are doing good in the world by providing such apps to very young children. Yes, the children are learning some math, but at what cost?
Electronic apps can be very useful to families and educators. They can help as information providers and organizers for parents – it is our hope that the EFM app is such a tool. Electronic apps also have a place in the classroom as tools to provide personalized assessments and recommendations, as well as other ways to help educators. However, they have severe drawbacks when they become the agent interacting with a young child at home or in the classroom.
Different Communities Need Different Approaches
What works in Utah may not work in communities in other states or countries. EFM realizes this and is constantly looking for different approaches that are appropriate for making change in different environments.
The wonderful math games from Math for Love will change a lot of lives, but not in places that can’t afford them or have access to them. Though I haven’t seen one yet, I think it is possible to create an electronic app that is meant to be used by a caregiver and child playing math together – this might be ideal for places that have smartphones but very little paper or other educational materials – we are looking for ways to incorporate this in our app. For communities with low literacy rates, we need to design the EFM materials to have audio and video options.
Family and community involvement in developing local programs can be essential for creating appropriate materials and also fostering engagement. However, many organizations make the mistake of taking this too far and giving parent groups the role of designing these programs. Doing this is similar to assigning a parent group the task of creating a K-12 math curriculum or creating a violin playing curriculum. Families know best what fits into their homes, but they are rarely domain specialists. Somehow, when it comes to early mathematics, it is all too easy for lots of non-specialists to have strong opinions.
There are many approaches EFM is pursuing, and many that we hope to invent and develop in the years to come. My days are filled with such thoughts and pursuits. Would you like to share your thoughts and skills and collaborate with us?
Don't Forget Reading
I don't want the early math education folks, and EFM in particular, to make the same mistake as the early reading folks. If you do the hard work of establishing a relationship with a family, make sure your program involves caregivers doing math and reading with their children. Reading and math are both incredibly important for a young child, and we should not let our focus on one area cause us to forget the importance of the other.
EFM currently does this with our annotated storybooks. Look for us to continue to add depth to our commitment to foster early reading. I have written about this topic in an earlier newsletter, so I will keep it short here.
Don’t Lose Sight of Deeper Reasons For Math
While looking at what is appropriate messaging for families and politicians, it is easy to lose sight of the deeper reasons for involving children with math and problem solving from an early age. Math has so much to offer beyond the practical considerations of success in school and careers, and what that implies for social equity. Of course those practical aspects are extremely important. But so is the more nuanced case that could be made for what math does for each person’s personal growth – this case won’t be made because it would distract from the lines of argument that most people feel are more compelling, but it is there even so.
Although these reasons may not be discussed overtly with the public, they absolutely should be incorporated into how an early math education program is designed and built. I won’t belabor this point as I’ve also written about this in an earlier newsletter. Also, Francis Su does such a beautiful job of it in his book Mathematics for Human Flourishing.
Get the Message Out
I wish that governments and large institutions would put this message out there: Caregivers, early math with your child is important and you have the power to make a difference, it’s a lot easier and more fun than you think, and with your help your child can do it. These organizations could make such a huge difference with this message and it would require almost no resources.
With so many adults having negative feelings about math, math is not politically attractive, and so no politicians talk about and promote early math education. Which is a huge missed opportunity (political and otherwise) in that improving early math education is one of the most direct and simple ways to improve inequality throughout the world.
Be a part of making this change happen. Imagine a world where all children enter kindergarten confident with strong math skills and loving all that math has to offer them!
If you have any questions or comments, please send them our way! We would enjoy the opportunity to chat with you. Also, if you are interested in collaborating with us or supporting us in any fashion, we would love to talk with you about ways we can work together!
March 18, 2024
Chris Wright
Chris@EarlyFamilyMath.org
Twitter | Facebook | Instagram
Early Family Math is a California 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation, #87-4441486.