Monday, August 23, 2010

Understanding Math Through Sports

Most weekends, if we are not out and about you will find Papa and Selena watching sports. Michael always tries to explain the game to her as well as the score. She just loves these special times with her Papa.

This weekend was like many weekends were both Selena and Papa were watching the Seattle Mariners. Selena began to inform us the score with every inning. I loved hearing her say the score is Zero to Zero. Pretty soon it went to Zero to One and she even included the team who had just scored. Papa asked her “What does that score tell you?” Selena answered, “It tells me that the Mariners are losing because they have less points then the Yankees.”

He got her to start counting strikes and balls, it was surprising how she figured out so quickly that 4 balls meant a walk and 3 strikes meant an out. He then helped her count the pitches that were being pitched with each batter up. It was cute to hear her suddenly say 3 balls and 3 strikes is 6 pitches.

Just as I grabbed the camera to get a picture of my two favorite sports fans in the process of learning math, the game was delayed due to rain. We never did get back to finish the game, oh well the Mariners lost 0 to 10 anyway, so it wouldn’t have been a real super game to go back to.

It is wonderful this year to hear Selena beg for her math, and to begin to see that numbers mean more to her now then just being numbers to count, she is beginning to understand that numbers play a huge part in her little world, from the calendar, math, time, and all sorts of different concepts.

This is being linked up at Monday Math hosted by Joyful Learner.

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4 comments:

  1. I love real life math like that. We don't have any sports fans here really. So no weekends of watching sports. Now, movies we watch a lot of.

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  2. It's fun that Selena learns the sports scores so early. It won't happen here for sure - we never watch sports. I know mentally that baseball is a very mathematical game, but I could never warm up to it.

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  3. Kids get it faster when math is situated in real life. It's also more fun. There's so much you can do with baseball math! I read a book about baseball and JC got ordinal numbers from that right away. I was amazed. It makes you wonder if we should be teaching math by rote at all!

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  4. Terrific math lesson, and memories with Grandpa being formed, all at once!

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