1966, I was looking forward to my fourth-grade year when the Chinese Communist dictator Mao launched his atrocious Cultural Revolution — Schools were shut down, books burned, teachers beaten, tortured, and many were murdered.
The mental math skills I learned before age ten was sufficient enough decades later for me to survive as a new American immigrant. For the past thirty years, I’ve been doing my own Federal and State taxes, in pencil and paper, hardly need a calculator.
I’ve witnessed during my twenty years as a public-school teacher in San Francisco that many high school students still count their fingers. It’s high time that America teach its young kids to learn some solid basic mental math skills – How to do math in their head, and calculate money by adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing, without using an electronic calculator. It’s at least a useful skill to balance their checkbooks when they grow up!
Math is not a dirty word. It is actually fun. All kids can learn if taught right.
I will post my easy-to-teach, easy-to-learn, and step-by-step mental math lessons on my website here. So, kids and their parents/guardian/tutor can work together.
Step One:
How to master the counting skills within ten (= essential skills to master numbers within 100):
- Count from one to ten;
- Count backward from ten to one;
- Count by even numbers (2, 4, 6, 8, 10);
- Count by odd numbers (1, 3, 5, 7, 9)
Please keep practicing with your child. Start with counting their fingers and toes. Practice makes perfect! Eventually they need to memorize by heart the four ways to count within ten without having to look at their fingers or toes anymore. If they have to pause and think, then they haven’t mastered the skills. Keep practicing till they reach the goal.
I look forward to hearing your feedback.
Step Two is coming up next!
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