Programmed to succeed at maths

Children are programmed to do whatever the adults around them do. When she was small, my eldest daughter was placed in the care of a lady who came to our home and looked after her while we went to work. This lady, when not caring for her and her baby sister, used to clean the house compulsively. That year, when we went to the Ideal Home Exhibition, we placed her in the children play room, which was being sponsored by the local toyshop. The last thing I saw on leaving her was her taking hold of a toy vacuum cleaner and starting to hoover the carpet. On my return some 90 minutes later, she was just arriving at the opposite corner of the carpet, having spent the whole time playing at vacuuming. Shame it didn’t survive throughout her teenage years. Why do they stop doing these useful things? Because adults do not expect them to continue. Children will learn to do the things that they are expected to do. If they live in a society where they are expected to stand up in a boat and spear fish, then they will learn the balance needed to stand in a boat at a young age. If they are expected to count in bases 12 and 20 (as was required for using UK currency before decimalization in 1971 – there being 12 pennies in a shilling and 20 shillings in a pound) then they will learn to count in bases 12 and 20 when still young. It is common for adults to think of maths as being hard. As a result it is common for people to expect children to find maths hard… so children find maths hard. At Puppet Maths we believe that maths is easy. It is not only easy it is also fun. We make it easy, we make it fun. We expect children to do well in maths, and as a consequence we expect that they will indeed do so.