Math Advice for Parents

This morning I got an email from mathematics educator, Jo Boaler of YouCubed from Stanford University. As a former participant in her online course and a follower of The Week of Inspirational Math I was curious to hear more from her and her ideas related to encouraging a math mindset.

Her email was directed toward involving parents in their child’s math education and to this end, she had listed six points she wanted to share with them:

You can download the full document here and it includes some great links on the second page to additional resources, games, apps, information about brain science, and more.

This week, I have an iPad Pro and Pencil on loan to me from Apple. I used the Pro and Paper53 to distill Jo’s message to parents into a sketchnote. I typically use a Cosmonaut on my regular iPad and I have to say the Pencil with the iPad Pro is just so good. Yes, there is a bit of lag but the sensitivity and ability to focus on details is awesome. And it really just feels like you have a familiar pen in your hand. I tried to do this quickly – as if I were at a conference or listening to Jo talk and the combination of the app and the pro/pencil made it a really efficient process at just under 12 minutes:

I think Jo’s ideas are great and could form the basis of a really interesting parent information session on math. If you don’t already follow YouCubed I would highly recommend it and hope to see more work along the lines of the Inspirational Week of Math coming soon.