Today’s blog post comes from Hannah Whitaker. Hannah taught elementary math across a broad range of pedagogies in New York City and in Denver and served as a mentor and model teacher for innovation schools in Denver. She currently homeschools her 5-year-old and 8-year-old in Denver, Colorado.

I thought Hannah’s reflections on using the Math for Love Supplemental Curriculum (for Grade 3) was a powerful testimony to how a play-based approach can transform student resistance, and also get deeper into meaningful mathematical thinking. If you’d like to try this lesson, it’s included in the curriculum sample here.

I’ll let Hannah take it from here.

Note: The name of Hannah’s son has been changed to protect his privacy.

A Math Win I Didn’t See Coming

Even though I thought I knew what I was doing when it came to teaching math, it’s actually been one of the areas I’ve struggled with the most to gain a rhythm. I’ve tried, or considered, most of the favorite curriculums listed on homeschool recommendation sites. My son, Conrad, has resisted all of them to varying degree. Despite being perfectly fine at math, he is not good at executive functioning with multiple steps, doing hard, non-preferred activities, listening to long explanations, or rebounding from incorrect answers. 

His resistance has evaporated since we’ve started incorporating Math for Love materials.

His resistance has evaporated since we’ve started incorporating Math for Love materials. Not only has math time become fun-filled, he’s been doing much more actual math as he processes theories and grapples with confusions. This allows me to immediately see the quality of his understanding and misunderstandings, which was difficult with crumpled up worksheets or overly scaffolded rote tasks.

Lesson – Day 4 of the 3rd Grade Curriculum

The Opener for Day 4 is the introduction of the “Close Calls and Bullseyes” game. By offering limited clues students must use logical reasoning to deduce the secret number. In a classroom I would have used several turn and talks and student explanations to get to the heart of the game without being overly didactic. But with one student I didn’t want to leave him frustrated right off the bat, so I gave clues for each digit but did NOT assign them to a particular digit, which was stretching the directions, but important for initial success as Conrad had no one except the dog to bounce ideas off of. 

This game got off to a rocky start until I suggested riding the bike around and giving a guess each lap. The beauty of these “go to” games is not just their versatility with logical reasoning, but the simplicity of the materials. We all know that math is everywhere in the world, but math instruction is usually limited to the workbook or computer. Openers like these can literally be done anywhere because it’s the thinking that makes this time math, not the finished online task or the completed worksheet. Embodying this with a bit of movement is a mainstay of our math time, but it’s not as effective when the work is rote, surface level, multi-stepped, or material dependent. Another reason the opener activities are successful for us is that they can be repeated indefinitely. Visual marks that something is “finished” leave my son’s brain closed instead of open, which was happening with the supposed “easy” spiral reviews in other programs. When the problem was done, so was he. But not when you can try to best your last round score while riding bikes! In fact, I had to set a timer to be sure we moved on with enough time for the next challenge.

The Main Activity of Day 4 centers on “Number Rod Fill-Ins” with a simple enough framing, “Can you fill in all the numbers using the illustrated number of rods?” Here is the launch example. 

Being early in the lesson sequence I thought this might end up being more of a materials exploration with some math to spark it, but was I wrong! 

The Work

Conrad started off eagerly with the obviousness of 0 and 1, and he had enough of a grasp on the task to not even attempt the 2, explaining that it wasn’t possible by counting the 5 straight lines forming the digit. But 3 was close enough to try out for himself, leading to naming the pattern, “that if it has more lines than the number, you can’t do it.” 

Coming to 7 independently was a great moment of watching his concept of equivalence strengthen in action. (Video)

It is such a welcome relief to me to be able to position myself as a guide and partner in exploring challenges, patterns, and math language that center in curiosity

The Win

After the success with 7, Conrad completed 8 and 9 willingly and quickly. Efficiently building the digits and then trading for ones until the goal was met. Because this was an exploration, he didn’t shut down after “getting” it, instead feeling confident to keep going in a task that piqued his curiosity. “Could these digits indeed be made with the rods? How easily?” And driven by an underlining “Why not?” Instead of the more habitual “Why?” (As in, “Whhhhhyyyy do I have to do this!?”)

It is such a welcome relief to me to be able to position myself as a guide and partner in exploring challenges, patterns, and math language that center in curiosity, and you can probably hear that same openness in my son’s voice in the video.

In fact, this lesson was so successful at opening up Conrad’s mathematical observing skills that when he went off to play, instead of resuming old projects, he had an “ah ha” moment with the string he’d been tying to a tree. “This is a great way to draw a perfect circle! You just walk around holding the string here.” And then immediately crafted a sundial as well, perhaps not accurately, but not, not accurately either. Next time will be even better, just as the exploration model in lessons we have ahead of us.