BedTime Math Blog Tour

I hosted a book review for Bedtime Math.  I am lucky today to have the chance to work in a Book Tour Blog Posting with the author, Laura Overdeck.  I have never been a fan of math... but my brother and my dad are both great at it... I would love for Broxton to pick up my love of reading, but also the love of math from the two of them.  With that being said, I wanted to do a blog tour of how to get kids into math more!!!

Let’s face it: in our culture, math doesn’t have the best image.  Lots of adults are afraid of math or feel they can’t do math, whereas we never hear any educated adult say, “I’m just not good at reading!”  Often adults’ math anxiety traces to a childhood where math wasn’t fun.  They remember math as a dry, tedious school subject that they never grasped comfortably.

So how do we avoid this fate with our next generation of budding math fans?  The first step as adults is to show we love math, or at least not advertise that we fear it!  Kids imitate their parents, and if we show enthusiasm for counting, for measuring objects and so on, kids will pick up on that.  Moreover, if we work it into a daily ritual like bedtime, or bathtime or breakfast, kids will see that we think it’s important.  We can all help make our country’s culture a little more academic and a little more rewarding of ‘smarts.”

The other critical ingredient is playfulness: working math into fun everyday recreation instead of reserving it for worksheets.  Last fall I looked at the top 100 kids’ educational books on Amazon to see how much more popular the alphabet was relative to numbers.  As expected, there were three times as many ABC books as 123s, but more disturbing was the nature of the math books.  While the ABC books all radiated fun – Dr. Seuss, Z Is for Moose and so on – every single number-related book on that list was a workbook.  It’s as if we’re determined to tell kids “math is about drilling.”  It shouldn’t be that way.  I’m thrilled to see that the book Bedtime Math is ranked above all or most of these workbooks, giving parents a far more fun alternative for their kids.

If we really want our kids to become math whizzes, they need to like math.  If they learn to like math before ever reaching school, before getting any preconceived notions, they’re far more likely to tackle the challenges as their math at school becomes more challenging.   The starting point is for them to enjoy it.

Laura Overdeck, Author, Bedtime Math: A Fun Excuse to Stay Up Late (Macmillan Children's Publishing Group, 2013)