[blparent] FW: Article from Time Magazine 2013 02 25 -- Bedtime Math

Sun Feb 24 21:23:12 UTC 2013

This is awesome!

Jo Elizabeth

Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch; nay, you may 
kick it about all day like a football, and it will be round and full at 
evening.--Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
-----Original Message----- 
From: Veronica Smith
Sent: Sunday, February 24, 2013 1:40 PM
To: 'Blind Parents Mailing List'
Subject: [blparent] FW: Article from Time Magazine 2013 02 25 -- Bedtime 
Math

I believe it. V

Beyond Counting Sheep By Bonnie Rochman One recent evening in West Caldwell,
N.J., a library hosted a pajama party. Twenty little kids in princess
nightgowns and football flannels counted out glittery animal stickers and
pasted them onto homemade dominoes. Then they raced a stuffed pink frog on a
carabiner up and down a zip line, raising and lowering their arms to speed
it up and slow it down--physics in motion.. Laura Bilodeau Overdeck, a
Princeton-trained astrophysicist turned stay-at-home mom, watched the scene
intently. This pajama party was her idea. She's the founder of the nonprofit
Bedtime Math, and she wants kids to fall in love with numbers. As part of
that mission, she wants to change the way parents put their kids to bed..
It's not that Overdeck, 43, is quibbling with the sacrosanct bath-then-book
nighttime routine. She just wants parents to add a math problem, as she and
her husband, investment-fund manager John Overdeck, have done with their
kids, ages 4, 7 and 9. A year ago she launched the Bedtime Math website; an
app and book are forthcoming. She's reached out to libraries across the
U.S., offering gratis do-it-yourself kits for Bedtime Math pajama
parties--dominoes, stickers and zip-line cord included. She is exploring
partnerships with organizations like the Girl Scouts in Chicago and is
hoping to reach science museums. Everyone knows they should read a book to
their kids before bed," she says, "but nobody knows they should be doing
math too. The core of Bedtime Math is pretty simple: a free daily math
problem, geared to one of three levels of difficulty: "wee ones"
(prekindergarten), "little kids" (kindergarten to second grade or so) and
"big kids" (second grade and up). The subjects tend to be ones that
especially appeal to children--candy, for example. A recent wee-ones
calculation: "M&M's last 13 months, but Life Savers last only 9 months,
despite their name. How many months will those M&M's outlast the Life
Savers? States, weather and arcane holidays like International Pancake Day
also play starring roles, as do animals; a recent problem asked kids to
calculate how far a skunk can spray its scent.. Overdeck is hoping that
candy and other child-friendly puzzles can be a remedy for math anxiety.
Research shows that early math skills are a better predictor of academic
success than reading ability. But the U.S. is in a numbers slump: America's
students rank 25th out of 34 industrialized countries in math. Everyone from
the Girl Scouts to Sesame Street has launched efforts to reverse the trend.
U.S. children are not performing up to the level one would expect," says
Sian Beilock, author of Choke, about performance anxiety. Part of the
problem might be cultural. You never hear people walking around bragging
that they can't read," she says, "but you hear people all the time saying 'I
don't do numbers.' Beilock, a psychology professor at the University of
Chicago, will soon lead a study of the program's impact on two groups of
preschool- and kindergarten-age children.. Bedtime Math is part of a project
that a lot of people are working on, which is, What is the cultural shift
that will get kids coming into school already comfortable with math? says
Dan Finkel, a co-founder of Math for Love, a Seattle outfit that advises
teachers on how to use games to spice up math education.. In contrast to
Math for Love, Overdeck targets parents, not educators. If it's related to
schools, it sounds compulsory," she says. We want kids to feel about math
the way they feel about dessert after dinner. The Overdecks have always done
math--bedtime and otherwise--with their kids, beginning when their oldest
was 2: they would count the appendages on the stuffed animals in her
collection. Last February, Laura began to share her family's math habit,
e-mailing a few friends and relatives a sample problem. Since then, 20,000
people have signed up to receive her daily messages. Bedtime Math now has a
staff of five; Laura still designs the problems, with the help of a calendar
of dates worthy of a challenge, such as Cookie Monster's birthday and the
anniversary of Alaska's statehood.. It's hard to argue that Bedtime Math
isn't fun, but some are skeptical that it's a cure-all. It won't be a slam
dunk for everyone who uses it," says Finkel, who thinks math before bedtime
revs kids up when they should be winding down. With the University of
Chicago study yet to start, the strongest evidence that Bedtime Math can
change children's skills comes from data collected from Snacktime Math, a
program of Bedtime Math problems given to kids attending summer camp at a
New Jersey Boys & Girls Club: more than 70% of the largely low-income
students improved their skills after a six-week session.. Most of the other
data in support of Bedtime Math are, for the time being, anecdotal. One
mother told Overdeck that her child's zest for Bedtime Math enables her to
use it as a threat: "If you don't brush your teeth now, no math tonight!
Sandy Smith, a Bedtime Math subscriber who attended the West Caldwell pajama
party with her two preschoolers, says, "I always concentrated on the reading
part, and I forgot to focus on the math. Her confession is all the more
revealing because she is an elementary school teacher.. In early February,
Bedtime Math threw a pajama party at Manhattan's brand-new Museum of
Mathematics, where kids can do things like live out geometry by pedaling
square-wheeled trikes over curved tracks. The Overdecks are major donors to
the museum, where some 100 kids made their own card-stock clocks and
tangrams while sipping hot chocolate. (Parents could opt for a splash of
Kahl*a in theirs.) We want math to be warm and fuzzy," says Overdeck. Which
isn't to say it should be easy. Thanks to popular demand, at the end of
February, Bedtime Math is rolling out a new, Einstein-like level of
difficulty, "the sky's the limit," for tweens, teens and even adults. When
it comes to end-of-the-day problem solving, why should little kids have all
the fun?.

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