Teaching Number Sense

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Neto
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Re: Teaching Number Sense

Post by Neto »

Caleb Everett, whose parents were also Bible translation missionaries in the same area of Brazil where we worked, has been researching this from a linguistic point of view.

Here is an article in Newsweek:
http://www.newsweek.com/anumerism-langu ... ers-591823

The original of this article is more extensive:
https://theconversation.com/anumeric-pe ... bers-75828

(It is my understanding that he has unfortunately followed his father in rejecting the truth of the Scripture and the witness of the created world around us, and is currently an atheist. But his observations in this article may help in understanding some of the difficulties in teaching number systems. His mother is still working there in the village, representing the truth of the gospel. This tribe has had contact with the gospel for many years. In fact, the first Wycliffe missionaries there were friends & classmates of my parents, who are now in their middle 80's.)
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Congregation: Gospel Haven Mennonite Fellowship, Benton, Ohio (Holmes Co.) a split from Beachy-Amish Mennonite.
Personal heritage & general theological viewpoint: conservative Mennonite Brethren.
Neto
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Re: Teaching Number Sense

Post by Neto »

Sorry for posting so many times in a row here w/o anyone else interacting, but there is one comment on the original article I cited above that is especially telling:
Steve Kane via Facebook
I live in a remote village in Portugal, when we arrived many people lived a basically neolithic lifestyle, except for the availability of metal- Many of the older generation were illiterate “analfabetico” but to my greater surprise I found that my immediate neighbours were innumerate in a far profounder way than I could at first understand. Obviously they had no intellectual impairment, and superficially they could carry things like “value” in a way that seemed normal, the could go shopping, but I realised that the role of number within their lives was utterly different. Custodio would, for instance, not be able to use a tape measure, not even to recognise the number to mark the spot. he would use a piece of string to measure something, tie a knot in it and take it down to the shop. He knew the names of different bores of tubes but he did not associate these names (imperial fraction measures actually) with a sequence or value, they were the names of that type of tube, like species of livestock, a cow is not twice a sheep, it is a bigger thing.Likewise I was blown away by his way of remembering a phone number. He imagined the push buttons on the dial as a town of shops, then he would know each button as a shop. one was the butchers, another hardware etc. His son’s phone number was a shopping list of products, he would buy them in sequence from his “town” walking around the dial, and hence the number would be dialled. He knew them by position, not by the figure on them. Needless to say he had very few numbers to store. Even talking about sums of money one has the feeling that they have a heirarchy in his mind of named amounts that are better or worse than another but not products of each other necesssarily. Within our own culture, or just up the mountain from it, there are ways of thinking involving language, that are almost as foreign as in Amazonia. I remember a primary school teacher here having a long argument with her pupils who would not agree that green was a colour, blue was, yellow was, but not green. Green is so omnipresent here, does it become invisible? or is it more important? Like “are humans animals?”, biology says yes, but for many they are not, is it so here for green?I never thought I would ever meet someone who could not recognise a number. I do not think he is unusual here in his generation, it is not a kind of personal dyslexia. A key thing is that people have only ever left here, never arrived, until we did, they return, but not to challenge their parents, so ancient thought forms survive, like Jersey cattle on Jersey, unpolluted by exotics.
The interesting thing about this to me is that with the many codes that I need to remember (business credit card security code, etc), I know that I don't so much remember the numbers, but the pattern - the way it looks on the number pad. So I am actually doing the same thing as the Portuguese man Steve Kane tells about in his comment I quoted above. (I hope there isn't a law against quoting from another source that this....)
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Congregation: Gospel Haven Mennonite Fellowship, Benton, Ohio (Holmes Co.) a split from Beachy-Amish Mennonite.
Personal heritage & general theological viewpoint: conservative Mennonite Brethren.
temporal1
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Re: Teaching Number Sense

Post by temporal1 »

Neto, Adam, Peregrino, others ..
it's a marvel to have the internet and this forum. what a privilege to read casual discussion between missionaries from distant locations, not only to read, but to join in discussion! never before in my life did i ever imagine such a thing, yet how quickly we all adapt (and soon take it for granted!) it's hard to keep perspective.

it's always well to remember, many more read than post here, and, many have seasonal work, so, the forum can slow down over spring+summer. we tend to think if no one replies, there's no interest, that's not always the case.

one way to get a hint about interest is to look at "views" of each thread.
some threads do not receive many posts, but a thousand or thousands of views.

i hope Peregrino is getting some tangible help here, esp for his teacher who feels ineffective. :)

i believe children are "always learning," they just may not be learning what we think we want, in the ways we want.

this thread is making me aware of how much we weave number education into most parts of our children's lives, from infancy. children, by design, imitate+emulate (esp) their parents, they are able to "make games" of imitation out of everything.

(fwiw) i think it's ok to quote from the internet, esp with sources identified.
copyrights are often about for-profit use.
(mods know the rules.)
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Most or all of this drama, humiliation, wasted taxpayer money could be spared -
with even modest attempt at presenting balanced facts from the start.


”We’re all just walking each other home.”
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Peregrino
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Re: Teaching Number Sense

Post by Peregrino »

Thank you all for your posts here. We finally have "real" internet here at the house and school so it is much easier to reply. Reading on a phone screen is OK but I still don't enjoy trying to type on that little screen.

One of you mentioned handling objects to get an idea of number value. I believe that will help a lot - most school books are geared toward children who already have the concept in their mind. I think we were trying to push them into the books too fast and they just needed some time to absorb the ideas before trying to correlate concepts to lines on paper. Another thing that is helping is music videos from the internet that teach numbers and counting in both Spanish and Rarámuri.

These Rarámuri people we work with are people that are already surrounded by western civilization and are being abused and taken advantage of by "civilized westerners" because of their lack of education - (paying fathers of families with liquor instead of money, for instance). In our area, there are many of them that have fled their Copper Canyon cultural area because of cartel violence. The children are growing up without the extended family and cultural support networks that their parents had. They are caught between two cultures - they don't fit into and are ashamed of their native culture but they cannot fit into the dominant Mexican culture either. Many, many of them simply fall through the cracks and slide into addiction and exploitation on the fringes of society.

By choosing to send their children to school, their parents are giving them some important tools to find their place successfully in Mexican culture. In our school, we are also trying to re-introduce our students to their native language and culture. The Secretary of Culture has given us a number of children's books in Rarámuri and we have watched several films in their language (including the Jesus film). Some of the children who told us they don't know Rarámuri have started talking it in public at school now. And a few of the girls have begun wearing the colorful dresses of their culture again. (Google Tarahumara dresses, they are very beautiful in them.)

While it might sound ideal to shelter these people from the evils of western civilization, we are several hundred years too late for that. At this point, the parents are wanting their children to get enough schooling to be able to make their way in the dominant culture without being exploited.
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Peregrino
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Re: Teaching Number Sense

Post by Peregrino »

Neto and Adam, I really enjoy your posts. Please keep sharing your experiences as inspiration hits. :up:

It seems "our" people are much less isolated than the ones you work with. The families we work with are in some ways, almost pariahs in their own culture because of the addictions that some of the parents struggle with. So the poor children are growing up with a double disadvantage, being looked down on by the Mexicans and Mennonites because of their culture and being looked down on by their own culture because of their parents (or lack of parents).
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Neto
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Location: Holmes County, Ohio
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Re: Teaching Number Sense

Post by Neto »

Peregrino wrote:Thank you all for your posts here. We finally have "real" internet here at the house and school so it is much easier to reply. Reading on a phone screen is OK but I still don't enjoy trying to type on that little screen.

One of you mentioned handling objects to get an idea of number value. I believe that will help a lot - most school books are geared toward children who already have the concept in their mind. I think we were trying to push them into the books too fast and they just needed some time to absorb the ideas before trying to correlate concepts to lines on paper. Another thing that is helping is music videos from the internet that teach numbers and counting in both Spanish and Rarámuri.

These Rarámuri people we work with are people that are already surrounded by western civilization and are being abused and taken advantage of by "civilized westerners" because of their lack of education - (paying fathers of families with liquor instead of money, for instance). In our area, there are many of them that have fled their Copper Canyon cultural area because of cartel violence. The children are growing up without the extended family and cultural support networks that their parents had. They are caught between two cultures - they don't fit into and are ashamed of their native culture but they cannot fit into the dominant Mexican culture either. Many, many of them simply fall through the cracks and slide into addiction and exploitation on the fringes of society.

By choosing to send their children to school, their parents are giving them some important tools to find their place successfully in Mexican culture. In our school, we are also trying to re-introduce our students to their native language and culture. The Secretary of Culture has given us a number of children's books in Rarámuri and we have watched several films in their language (including the Jesus film). Some of the children who told us they don't know Rarámuri have started talking it in public at school now. And a few of the girls have begun wearing the colorful dresses of their culture again. (Google Tarahumara dresses, they are very beautiful in them.)

While it might sound ideal to shelter these people from the evils of western civilization, we are several hundred years too late for that. At this point, the parents are wanting their children to get enough schooling to be able to make their way in the dominant culture without being exploited.
The fact that you have taken an interest in them will go a long ways in restoring their pride in their own culture & language. (And No, that is NOT 'bad pride'.) The people we lived with in Brazil denied even knowing their language at all when first contacted by Wycliffe Bible Translators members. And in fact many of them were actually nearly monolingual. (All of the women & children hid the whole time the 'outsiders' were there. This was in 1975, 11 years before I arrived there for the first time.) It is extremely difficult to revive a language after it is no longer spoken in the home. But I suspect they were just embarrassed to speak it in front of outsiders.
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Congregation: Gospel Haven Mennonite Fellowship, Benton, Ohio (Holmes Co.) a split from Beachy-Amish Mennonite.
Personal heritage & general theological viewpoint: conservative Mennonite Brethren.
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Bootstrap
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Re: Teaching Number Sense

Post by Bootstrap »

Peregrino wrote:Is there any one on this forum that has experience in teaching children of illiterate parents?

We are currently really struggling to find a way to teach the concept of numbers to a group of 4 to 6 year olds. Even the concept of 1 is just not getting through after 3 months of working with them. Any ideas on how to wake up their minds and make the breakthrough in their thinking?
The concept of 1 in what sense? What have you tried, and what have they not been able to do?

I've done this with deaf children and mentally impaired children, I usually just made groups of blocks or pennies or whatever and had them tell me how many were there, starting with 1 or 2. When they get that right, try 1, 2, and 3. Then add 4.

For 1 and 2, body parts work well. How many noses do I have? How many ears? It can be easier for some kids to see them on someone else. For other kids, it may be easier to sense them on their own body.

Or do it with groups of kids. Put 1 kid in one corner, ask how many kids. Put 2 kids in another corner. Move the 2 kids to where the 1 kid is, ask how many kids are there now. Keep it moving, keep it fun, keep it physical. If they get it wrong, don't shout, "no!", try, "hmmmm, anyone else want to guess?" Because if kids get the sense that they can't get anything right, they shut down and stop trying. If you see that happening, back off and find something they can succeed in, because whatever you are trying to teach them at the time is less important than helping them have the sense that they can learn.
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