From Math Mystery to Math Mastery – Part 2

Math begins in the body. Most kids, by the time they are in preschool and certainly Kindergarten know a lot about their 1s,2s,5s, and 10s. Why? Because we are made up of 1s,2s,5s, and 10s. 1 nose, 1 belly button,2 eyes, 2 ears, 5 fingers on one hand, 10 toes, 1 ME and so forth. Parents play games with children early on and most of them learn their own body geography and the sense of the reality of these numbers. They know it inside and they get it cognitively once we adults begin to identify it that way.To do this they have to have a sense of their own bodies in space – technically this is called Proprioception. We learn where we are in space in relation to ourselves and our own environment through stimulation of proprioceptors that are in our joints, muscles and tendons, all the way back to our in-utero and birth experiences. When, for whatever reason, this sense does not process information accurately, consistently or in an organized manner, we don’t have a full sense of ourselves, our boundaries. This leads to a need to bump up against other people and things to find ourselves, invading others’ space emotionally and physically, an immature sense of relationships in our own space often then leads to a difficulty in establishing and understanding relationships between other people and things and certainly abstracts like numbers.By developing and integrating my daughter’s sense of propioception as well as other neurodevelopmental systems, her body learned to find itself, recognize its relationship to other people and things in her environment and build on this “knowing” to understand the abstracts of mathematics. She established a baseline within herself which allowed her intelligence, natural curiosity and enjoyment of learning connections and solving problems to take on the challenges set forth in the math problems. Then learning became fun and there was no stopping her.