User-Friendly Math for Parents: Learning and Understanding the Language of Numbers Is Key

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User-Friendly Numbers in Math for Parents shares stories of students reasoning, thinking, and sometimes misunderstandings about numbers - stories that provide the opportunity to see math differently. Most of the students are visual-spatial, creative, daydreamers who may miss the details in math, a characteristic of visual-spatial learners. Through these stories, parents will see mathematics through their childs eyes, both the clarity and the confusion. Armed with this new sight, and therefore insight, parents will be able to talk differently with their child about the number language of math. By seeing numbers through new eyes, children and parents can take control of the math language and therefore, the mathematics. This book focuses more on the why reasons behind math number relationships, explained in plain English and with images that show number relationships. By including more images and fewer formulas, readers especially the visual spatial learners have a better chance of understanding how number organizers apply to different number types. Recognizing connections among number formats significantly reduces the impatience, frustration, and heartache around homework.

Reviews

For the past 25 years, Cathy Draper and I have engaged in many fascinating conversations focused on teaching and learning math. Two things are clear to me. Cathy has a deep understanding of conceptual and practical math. Cathy, unlike many educators, knows that each human brain assimilates and processes in its own unique way. I have witnessed her analysis and diagnosis of each "student", and applauded as she found the unique prescriptive approach needed to help them understand and learn in their own way. She takes math from the linear left-brain to the visual, conceptual right brain and develops an approach that successfully integrates the two into a whole-brain approach. Sharing her lifetime of math experience with us is her gift to the world. -- Mary Ann Grassia, M.Ed, former board member, Math Science Collaborative Project, Salem State University; retired Salem public school teacher
Catheryne Draper makes math homework less of a chore and more of a game. She succeeds at this by saying use visuals and use the imagination. The highlight for me was the chapter on Becca's Pattern Ancestors. The two children in my life, at ages four and six, began using "Silly Bands" to form groupings and create patterns. Years later, they both now understand sequences, and they are working on factoring and quadratic expressions. Catheryne demonstrates through out her book that math can be learned by using visuals and a child's imagination and that there isn't just one method for teaching but to use the method that is most effective for your child. -- Kathy Miles, Mutual fund compliance and product development, NY

Author Bio

Catheryne Draper has been learning from her students for over half a century of teaching, supervising the math program in a school district, advising math education at the state level, coaching math in schools, and presenting math workshops for teachers. She is the author of The Algebra Game, a hands-on multi-deck algebra program in four topics covering Linear Graphs, Quadratic Equations, Conic Sections, and Trig Functions that allows students to work together in cooperative groups, or individually, to identify the algebra relationships and patterns in the each topic and in the organization across the topics. In addition to contributing many published articles, Draper is also the author of Winning the Math Homework Challenge: Insights for Parents To See Math Differently.