This post is a continuation of my post on teaching math to young children here.
Chapter 6 of Kamii’s book (Young Children Reinvent Arithmetic)
talks about the difficulty young children have with subtraction. She points out that many math textbooks
introduce subtraction shortly after the introduction of addition to 5 or
6-year-olds, however subtraction involves thinking negatively about quantities—or
thinking about the absence of a quantity, which is difficult for children at
this age. Experiments that she describes
in the chapter show that until age 7 many children have a difficult time
thinking about amounts negatively, and consequently subtraction is a pretty
complicated operation for them. The
exception, to this rule, is in word problems.
When children are given word problems, they often will use
addition to solve a subtraction problem in their head. Word problems give more meaning to the
concept of subtraction and so many 5 and 6-year-olds can figure them out
without instruction—and even those who don’t will benefit from the mental
process of trying occasionally.
Kamii also points out that as children become very good at
addition and are able to immediately give answers to addition problems such as
5 + 5 or 6 + 1, they become able to easily give the answers to the
corresponding subtraction problems (10 – 5 and 7 – 1). So rehearsing addition problems through games
seems to be a good way to build in children an ability to subtract mentally as
well.
My take-ways from all of this:
For Finn’s Kindergarten and First grade years, II will focus
on the teaching of addition through games and present him with word problems
that represent both addition and subtraction, but I will not expect him to
solve written subtraction problems yet.
No comments:
Post a Comment