Morning Clay Talk

My 7 year old daughter E was not feeling very good about her math skills. It’s because her 5 year old little brother C is obsessed with math and is constantly trying to learn the same things she is. He also plays on the calculator to reinforce what he learns and tries to logic out random things he punches in. E got frustrated at a math game because she was doing subtraction on the hardest difficulty one night because she thought C was doing it too. That was not a good night.

I went over to the math game after she fell asleep to figure out exactly how hard it was. It was actually surprisingly difficult, with large numbers subtracted by large numbers. There was a lot going on that it was difficult to reason it out in your head without some practice (or pen and paper) for an adult. There was no way C was doing this.

The next morning, E was laying in bed and I went over to talk to her. I told her that she should try to focus on her own skills. She does well in math and told her that C was definitely not doing the hardest difficulty for subtraction in the math game. IT was hard for me and I wanted her to focus on doing the lower levels to master it before moving on.

I also told her that while she was young, her brain was like fresh clay. It was easy to mold and learn as long as she was not intimated by something or purposefully avoiding something (especially frustrating if avoiding something was because she did not want to compete or be measured against C). While she was young, she needs to learn as much as possible and quickly before that clay hardens. I then walked through decimals with her because it was something that she wanted to learn. When I framed it in dollars and cents, she got really comfortable with it and all was well.

This was about a 15 minute conversation and of course my wife was now yelling at me to get her ready for the day. It was good to take that extra time with E though and I’m glad these little talks seem to help. We are just building slowly block by block and I hope it leads to her tackling whatever she needs to learn head on.