Hands on Math Discovery

We come to the suc­cess­ful com­ple­tion of anoth­er year. Many home­school­ers look out the win­dow in May and dream of this day. The day to put away the pen­cils, shelve the books, and close the lap­top. Although these next few weeks may sig­nal the com­ple­tion of an era, it is not the com­ple­tion of learn­ing. We nev­er stop learn­ing. In fact, the more that we learn, the more we real­ize that learn­ing is a life­long ven­ture. Oh what dis­cov­er­ies will we make this sum­mer! Dis­cov­er­ies of ani­mals liv­ing in the woods next to the house, or pat­terns in the grass where we mow are lurk­ing around every corner. 

These dis­cov­er­ies although not book-cen­tered, are made more spe­cial in bal­anc­ing our text learn­ing. It is in books that we learn about the life habits of the ground hog, thus open­ing the door to becom­ing sci­en­tif­ic observers. Most home­school par­ents under­stand this intu­itive­ly. We buy the ani­mal nature guides and encour­age our kids to look up the dif­fer­ent birds they see. But do we end there? Do we encour­age them to map out the lawn into a grid and per­form a pop­u­la­tion test for bugs? Do we chal­lenge them to cal­cu­late the height of a tree from its shad­ow using ratios? Or dis­cov­er the irra­tional num­ber π from the trunk of a tree? 

We’ve spo­ken briefly about the mys­ter­ies of math­e­mat­ics and the dis­cov­er­ies that can be made. Let’s add some real life won­der and dis­cov­ery of truth for the abstract con­cepts we’ve stud­ied so hard!