Helping Creative Children Survive Math
There is no way around it. Sometimes children have to do something that isn't creative. For creative children, this can be a challenge. They don’t like to stay within the facts, and they don’t like to do work that requires no imagination. The challenge for the parent can be to add a creative element to even the dullest work. The child will still have to do the boring work, but can follow up with a creative extra. Remember that it won't hurt a child to have to do uncreative work periodically. Life if full of dull tasks, and everyone must learn to do them.
The first step is to teach the child the correct attitude toward dull work. It's something that must be done, so he might as well do it quickly and get it over with. Dawdling won’t make the task go away (so be sure you don’t eliminate the task because he didn’t do it.) Secondly, he can think creatively, even if he has to be uncreative on paper.
For example, this is a standard story problem:
“Jared wants to buy a train set for his little brother. It costs twelve dollars, but he only has eight dollars and twenty-nine cents. How much more does he need?”
You can make this problem creative by adding the following additional question: “What are some ways he could earn this money?” If you present your own story problems, you can add it yourself. If you use problems in books, ask your child to create a creative question to answer about the story problem. Ask him to think of alternate solutions, value issues (Should Susan buy a less
expensive present than the one she knows her sister wants?) or other ways to solve the problem. For instance, if a problem involves subtracting two numbers, he should do it the way he has been taught, but he might also try to think up other ways to solve it. For instance, he might test compensation as a way to subtract without regrouping. Which way does he prefer? Or try doing math the way the ancient Egyptians did it.
There are a number of sites on the web that show you how to make math interesting. Even if every lesson can’t be exciting, you can intersperse interesting activities with the dull ones. One of my favorite creative math sites is Mega-Mathematics. Older children can practice proofs by figuring out where to put some ice-cream stands. A coloring lesson concerning maps will introduce children to very high-level math. Your children can tackle a task the best computers haven’t been able to resolve!
Try visiting an online lecture for kids called Base8 and Other Math for People Who are Missing Fingers.
It’s not entirely creative, but it’s unusual enough that children will forget they're supposed to be bored. We count in base ten, which means that when we get to nine, we switch to a two-digit system. This is because we have ten fingers. The article shows children how we would count and add if we only had eight fingers, and then challenges them to rewrite the article to teach kids about another base system. They are also challenged to think of real-life situations that use other bases and to decide if it’s possible to have a base one system. Now it’s creative! When they do math, challenge them to redo it in another base, and to decide which would be best for the situation.
Don’t hand out the same old worksheets day after day. Take the math out of the book and try real life applications or use a method so out of the ordinary that your child will forget to be bored. Extend problems to allow a child to imagine or think. You might even let him make up his own creative math story problems. Math doesn’t have to be dull!
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