Grades K-3
When Generations Gather
Holiday Gatherings The fall and winter holidays are thrilling for kids, and busy for parents. Kids love to be involved in the planning and the doing. Parents can enlist their help, and in the process, use the holidays as a great opportunity to build some math competencies along the way. When generations gather, we have a great chance to let our children explore the idea of number, and build an inner sense of the arithmetic operations they’ve been learning in school.
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Grandma Gloria is 68.
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 Rather than show your children how to set up these problems, let them explore and find their own way. Offer help if they need it, but you can take a relaxed approach at home. In school, speed is important, but the home environment gives them an invaluable chance to explore and think, which, as you’ll discover on these pages, is the biggest and most significant thing parents can do for long-term success.
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To think is to succeed. |
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If we make them half as big, how many will be get? |
 Food. When generations gather, there’s usually plenty of food. Let your children get involved in the planning. It can be simple. Let them count how many people will be coming. You can ask a bunch of good, thinking questions with this as your starting point.
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| Visual problems, and hands-on problems are especially fun when food is involved. How would we cut a round cake to have enough slices for each of our guests (circle division will be important not only in geometry, but in trigonometry, and beyond that, in calculus). How about a rectangular cake? Notice any relationship between the number of horizontal and vertical slices and the total number of pieces? | |||
| Adapt these to your own situation and your own child, and look at other sections of Newton’s Window On-line for more ideas. Ideas for the older grades can always be used in a simplified version for younger kids. |
