Teaching maths to creative children

[threescoopsundae]

Hi all
I think it's a widely accepted generalisation that kids with an aptitude for art, can struggle with their numbers. Does anyone know if there are any techniques/methods of teaching maths that help it all click in a little artist's brain?
My DS is in yr2. He's bright enough, articulate, solid achiever in literacy and is exceptionally artistic. But his understanding in maths is next to non-existent. We asked him today if we had 30 sweets to share between our three children, how many would they have each. He didn't know where to start!
I have asked the teacher (who I think is generally amazing!) if she feels we need to see if there's some kind of "problem" but she says no, it's just his weaker subject. Which is fine, he can't be good at everything, but I can't help thinking this might be something on which studies have been done and that some professor somewhere may have a method that could help him achieve.
I'm a big believer that ability is in each child, we just sometimes need to find a way to unlock it!

I've found lots of books/sites on how to teach maths creatively, but not how to teach maths to creative children, IYSWIM.

widely accepted generalisation that kids with an aptitude for art, can struggle with their - in 35+ years of teaching it has not been my experience.

I agree with IsItFriday only issues I ever see is parents/others reinforcing it in children's minds that some people just don't get maths and it is ok to be bad at maths... If a parent ever says 'I was always horrendous at maths at school so I expect she will be' I want to scream..

Teacher sounds right, just a weaker subject. Lots of practice and positivity will help :)

I'm not saying you are that parent OP, just that it tends to be the common issue when a child is strong in all areas except maths

creative children, just like any other can benefit from strategies designed to engage their interest in maths if they have become distanced from the subject due to prior lack of achievment.
one girl I work with became more enthusiastic after her interest in painting was combined with maths, tessalation work, symmetry, co-ordinates via cubism (Picasso inspired) etc, a boy I worked with became more engaged when every area was tailored to football, perimeter of a football filed, area of pitch to be covered by each player, probability and ratio linked to football teams and scores etc.
The engagement leads through to early achievement, confidence building and interest in maths as an abstract concept.
For many very young children food can be a good solid tool, instead of the question you posed regareding weeks and children, which is highly conceptual (ie can't be touched) and is not a gague of mathmatical ability - (many 7 year olds would be pondering the number of days in the week first and be trying to mentally 7 x 30 before division, and then only with dots and circles drawn attempt to draw 210 dots before discovering the easier method of 30 / 10).
Divison is much harder than multiplication, for a child weak in maths focus on multiplication, then build inverse operation only when solid grasp of inter-relation (5x4 is the same as 5x4) is formed.

There's a whole lot of reading about right and left brain tendencies. Your son, as a creative, will be confidently drawing from the right side of his brain. You want, as a parent, to neurologically stimulate the left side but within the confines of his comfort zone, aesthetic experience. Maths, that clearly share disciplines are patterns and shapes. Reinforcing number families (+/- & multi/divide), using number cards and number lines (pegs on a washing line) maybe of use as would be holding shapes and discussing its properties. A lot of Maths is rote learning though so joining an online site to practise the basic maybe of great value too! Best of luck :)

There's a whole lot of reading about the nonsense that is right/left brain theory

www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0071275

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/16/left-right-brain-distinction-myth

psychology.about.com/od/cognitivepsychology/a/left-brain-right-brain.htm

www.psychologytoday.com/blog/brain-myths/201206/why-the-left-brain-right-brain-myth-will-probably-never-die

www.oecd.org/edu/ceri/neuromyth6.htm

www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/08/130814190513.htm

mathematics an extremely creative discipline

I was going i think people mistake being arty for being creative. Engineers are very creative and need to be excellent at maths.

Thanks all for your feedback... All my kids have different strengths and weaknesses and that's fine with me! It's only positive reinforcement in this house!

But he's going to be in compulsory maths lessons for a lot of years so want to see if I can make it as comfortable for him as poss... Last thing he needs is to struggle and have his confidence knocked. That's why I'm trying to find methods that he can relate to. I like the idea of relating to his passions. I guess there are no new concepts out there. I thought someone might mention numicon as it's a very visual way of learning. But I don't know much more about it than that.

I guess I was thinking of my own family too in my generalisation (which I have heard elsewhere, but clearly generalisations don't apply to all!) in which we have 3 generations of highly successful artists in different fields, all of whom hated and struggled with maths at school... And I'm sure it's simply that the way they were taught didn't "speak" to them. Don't want my boy to hate any part of school!

Hello OP, my dd is creative and struggles with maths too.
We do lots of practical maths and play lots of games and she is slowly improving.
We do times tables going up the stairs, weights and measures in the supermarket along with money.
You can do lots of maths when out and about, telling the time, etc.
Fractions, dividing, halving and multiplication can be done through baking etc.
Take out the kings and jokers from a pack of cards and play times table game. I put down a 2 of hearts, you put down 10 clubs. First person to shout 20 wins the cards.
My dd loves this game and is getting much quicker.

nrich.maths.org/4770

“Without mathematics there is no art,” Luca Pacioli, a contemporary of Da Vinci.

Quite Mrz!

There's so much logic in his creativity... He's just got to apply it in the way that the national curriculum demands :)

A child who can see the patterns in number is half way there

Well that's good then

Morethanpotatoprints thanks for the tips. All sounds good. Was thinking of a cd of times tables songs too.

We use an American homeschooling series called Life of Fred. It is barmy, based on a five year old maths professor. There are disadvantages, it's quite American and I am endlessly translating dollars and cents and so on. But its genius is that it teaches maths by telling stories. Which I suspect might be useful.

You can get them over here from Conquest Books.

www.conquestbooks.co.uk/christian_books.php?menu_page=219

That page also has links to the sample texts from the books too. You would need to start at the very beginning with Apples, as it doesn't make sense otherwise.

This might also work for times tables too.

www.amazon.co.uk/Harrys-Magic-Tables-Teach-Little/dp/0717151069

Interesting, because I always heard that creative skill and maths skill tend to go together. IME it's reading which tends to be affected - I did a course based on graphics and art and literally 50% of the class was dyslexic.

Others are right though that generalisations are unhelpful and it's best to try different ways to engage different children.

All kids are creative - and all can and should be great at maths. As adults we like to label ourselves as "creative, technical, mathematical, linguistic" but as soon as we do it to our kids we create an expectation that just might channel them into a particular area.

Hi threescoopsundae:

I had real troubles with DD1 in her first few years of primary school - she just quite simply couldn't add above numbers to 20 and couldn't subtract at all (up to May Year 2).

Our solution was trying different things until we came upon something that made sense to her.

In our case it was mathsfactor (www.themathsfactor.com/) - which had the advantage of being presented by carol Vorderman - a video lesson where the ever cheerful Carol explains a concept. A little practice exercise/ warm - up and then 10 - 30 problems reviewing that concept. It's good old fashioned learning through watching someone do it and then trying it yourself. But dividing it up into bite sized chunks and teaching the concept really helped make sense of maths skills for DD1 - who was not responding well to quizzes, fill-in the blank multiplication squares/ number squares, etc...

There's a ton of on-line support out there and many boys respond well to gaming platforms and therefore don't mind 'practicing' maths skills in that format:

FREE websites:

Woodlands Junior Maths Zone: resources.woodlands-junior.kent.sch.uk/maths/ - just select the area you want more practice in/ to work on and follow links to resources. A bit of a hunt to find the right game - but worth an explore.

Cool Maths for Kids - www.coolmath.com/ - a bit clunky - but there are lessons (to explain how to do something)/ games/ resources - all a great help.

Multiplication dot com has tons of games to help bed down those crucial times tables: www.multiplication.com/

Math Champs - has games grouped by ages 5-7/ 7-9 and 9-11. This can make a child feel bad if they're struggling with games allegedly for younger children - but try to gloss over that: www.mathschamps.co.uk/#home

• as mrz has recommended nrich maths is fabulous - but this can be off-putting for students that are still struggling to 'get' core skills - so best to explore once concepts are sound perhaps.

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On-line tutorials also exist.

As I've said Mathsfactor was great for my girls (but may not appeal to a boy).

But there's a lot out there. Several here on MN have recommended/ praised:

mathletics: www.mathletics.co.uk/
komodomaths komodomath.com/
Maths Whizz www.whizz.com/

I think all of these tutorials & mathsfactor (link higher up) - have free trials and information for parents to find out more.

Genuinely - have started with a child who just didn't get it and achieved NC L1 at KS1 SATs in maths - I can assure you that we've found slowly but surely putting in regular practice & regularly playing maths based video games makes a huge difference. It builds confidence & skills and success in class sort of reinforces the desire to get even better at maths.

HTH

"Last thing he needs is to struggle and have his confidence knocked. That's why I'm trying to find methods that he can relate to."

Struggle in an of itself is not a bad thing! Hard-won success builds confidence and increases resilience. You can increase his engagement and therefore motivation by finding an application that he already has an interest in. However, I think we do a dis-service to our kids when we try to process everything into bite-size pieces and remove the challenge - it is the intellectual version of not letting kids climb trees because they might not be able to make it up there and even if they do they will fall.

Arithmetic isn't even that hard, and you DS would probably pick most of it up without formal teaching given time and opportunity. People (even kids) in many parts of the world learn and use arithmetic without the benefit of school, demonstrated by making change when buying/selling, keeping track of herds of animals, planning and constructing objects/buildings etc.

Give him lots of opportunities to need arithmetic skills in his daily life and he will learn because he needs to. Most of the DVDs, books and apparatus to "encourage learning" are simply an expensive extension of the toy industry.

This is great, thanks so much! PastSellByDate, I'm going to trawl through those sites and see what I think would work. So great to see there are tools out there which we can use together. Thank you...
I appreciate that making maths real in everyday situations etc is valuable. But in reality with a job, 2 other kids, volunteering, etc... I just don't have the capacity to plan these things for myself... Engineering a day where he needs to use maths to accomplish things and then taking time out to explain the lesson sounds exhausting! A prescribed activity that we can take time out to complete together is brilliant! I know I'll find the key somewhere out there...

Really appreciate the time taken by you guys to provide concrete suggestions!

"All my kids have different strengths and weaknesses and that's fine with me!"

Don't label them too much in your head as 'the arty one', 'the maths one', 'the sporty one' - you can end up accidentally supporting those boxes and putting children off things they'd otherwise be very good at even if it's not their 'best' subject.

This book:

www.amazon.co.uk/Mathematics-Explained-Primary-Teachers-Haylock-ebook/dp/B00J2B9M4I

is good for parents too, it explains some of the research behind the way maths is taught to children today and the stumbling blocks children have over some concepts.