Early Algebra for Kids

During pandemic lockdowns I had the opportunity to teach my 7yo son maths at home. It does not work for all kids, but he showed a very strong interest in symbolic manipulation. School overemphasizes arithmetic and arithmetic algorithms ad infinitum (extremely tedious and boring!). Our work plan is simple: a problem each day (together when the concepts are new), immediate reward after he finishes, and increase difficulty once he is ready. After one year, we have just started trigonometric equatio

My son started in the Russian School of Math - a pretty popular after-school program in many US cities. What is fascinating is the core theory that algebra can be grasped by children as young as 6. And there seems to be some truth to this given my son's experience.One random shout-out: I think if more of us learned math from folks like 3 Blue 1 Brown we would love it enough to explore it more. I don't know if I'm smart enough to have become a master mathematician but I find mys

It looks like we have a misconception of the verb "to learn". Conveying some very general intuition of the subject from adult to a kid is not learning, actually. Learning assumes conscious effort to comprehend relatively complex things, constantly overcoming pain of uncertainty, most mathematicians will agree with me here. This is not what is usually expected from a kid. Don't do that.

Unfortunately I don't know any direct resources. I really do hope they are out there and some will share.But if you're willing to hunt, I know that this idea was attempted before[0]. France and USSR had better success than the US. I'm sure there are still people working in this direction. I don't have children, but fwiw I've taught my nieces and nephews algebra and even some of calculus before they were 10 just in visiting time during vacations. They were bored and it

Depends on the kid(s), age, progress so far etc i would think.Up to high school algebra level I can talk a little about but ymmv. Everyone is different.The number Devil is an enjoyable story. Khan academy has a good problem bank with gamification of progress etc. Mathantics is a good substitute for school teaching of conventional stuff on video and has good worksheets. Mathific app is another source of practise and gamified progress.Interested to hear other ideas and for other ages.

This is nonsense. I do simple algebra with my daughter and she's in 3rd grade.All it takes is a little one-on-one time and some interest.Kids are way smarter that you realize.

That's true but I think the issue lies in how slowly mathematics is taught: when you spend all of elementary and middle schools repeating the same material over and over. During elementary school I used to change all the minuses to pluses on the homeworks since I didn't like subtract but I was doing basic algebra (basic polynomials) before I entered elementary school. At that point I was reading interesting math books for fun. I was able to find some math puzzle books and was slowly making my wa

I don't remember. Googling gave me these:http://educationnext.org/much-too-early/https://www.education.com/magazine/article/higher-math-grade...<a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_CulturesWhen I was homeschooling my son I got him between 2-3 grades above grade level at math. He was so good at mental arithmetic that I had to improve my skills to keep up with him. On the other hand I was not able to get him to do algebra at all and he did not master it in high school although he did OK with geometry.From my vie

Completely False. I started to learn mathematics starting in preschool and when I arrived in the US I was shocked by what passed as mathematics education in the US. The stuff American students where doing in 6th grade I had already done in 3rd grade. It might be that starting later is a good idea but the exact opposite was true for me. If I had been forced to learn mathematics the way American students learn it, well then I would have been bored out of my mind and would have given up learning it