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Spring brings new inspiration and learning opportunities as we emerge from the dark days of winter with more creative approaches to learning. In February when I got COVID, I worried that our Math Magic students would never learn much about fractions, decimals, and percentages if they did not know number combinations and multiplication facts by age 9 or 10.
Brain research tells us that people who are good at math use the spatial parts of their brains to think quantitatively. They can see that something fits or does not fit a space. With this in mind, we started using pie charts with multicolored paper pieces of pie to represent fractions in a circle, but it did not seem to bring understanding of quantities in the way I had hoped it would.
The text suggested using the term "Story Problems" to reduce the fear of "Word Problems," but we wondered how our students would ever be able to solve any math problems if they could not add, subtract, multiply and/or divide. I kept trying to help them gain a sense of space as well as a concept of quantities.
My best inspiration came from the plastic and Styrofoam Easter eggs at the local Dollar Store. Of course, these toy eggs needed some structure to make the eggs fit into spaces where the logic of fractions becomes clearer, and learning number combinations and multiplication facts may be possible, and the grocery store had the ideal boxes to hold 12 eggs in two neat lines of six.
There in a box of colored eggs, it is very clear why twelve is such a useful number in our Western business tradition. Twelve can be divided in half and provide six eggs for two families. If a dozen eggs are divided into thirds, three families can each have four eggs. If a dozen eggs are divided among four families, each family can have three eggs. If there are six children in one family, each kid gets two eggs. From a box of twelve eggs parents could decide to put away two thirds (eight eggs) to use for the next two days, or three fourths (nine eggs) to use for the next three days.
There we have it: story problems are not a problem if kids can see a colorful box of eggs. The eggs may be plastic or real, but they need to be brightly colored to set them apart in groups.
If each student moves the egg groupings and states what fraction of the whole dozen eggs are blue, or pink, or yellow, it will facilitate spatial conceptualization.
Many egg-excellent story problems can be developed using dyed eggs or plastic eggs. If parents and grandparents will help children think about the spatial and quantitative relationships between objects in their home environment, math will not be a strange and abstract experience for them.
The speckled Styrofoam eggs from China come in boxes of 10, and these speckled eggs can help to move the conversation in the direction of decimals and the metric system using base 10.