Archive for the ‘Math Learning’ Category

Summer is finally here. It’s time for some outdoor fun with family and friends to celebrate Independence Day. The Forth of July is a great opportunity to incorporate summer math games with U.S. history lessons. Here is a great arts and crafts flag math activity that will have your kids popping like a firecracker. Flag math [...]

Lights, cameras, math geeks! The typical A-lister is a parfait of perfection: golden hair, blinding white Veneers, and a multitude of creative talents. But there's a secret math geek lurking beneath the polished surface of each of these celebrities.

by Dawn Morris, M.A. of Moms Inspire Learning I can remember making “trains” with upright dominoes as a child.  It took a long time to set them up just right, but then it was so much fun to watch them falling into each other so quickly! It was kind of like watching a tiny roller coaster [...]

The genesis of how DreamBox does assessment, and one of the reasons I am with the company, occurred over 30 years ago when one of my relatives was diagnosed with a learning disability.

This surprised us and shocked his teachers, who considered him to be in the upper middle to top third of the class for math. His test scores consistently supported this. In many areas he was significantly ahead of his peers. Yet a detailed examination with an expert showed that for him division just didn't compute. Put another way, his brain simply wasn't "wired for division".

The box claims this game is appropriate for ages 3+. It’s wrong. There’s just no way. Where do I even begin? There are so many chutes and ladders that it’s difficult to discern each individual box on the game board. It’s also hard for my three-year-old to know if she’s moving towards the right or the left. (The board is a series of switchbacks. Start from the bottom left corner and move across to the right. At the end of the row, move up one row and progress from right to left.) Although there are arrows at the end of every row, this does nothing to help when her piece is in the middle of the row.

If you haven't heard, sponsors announced this year's theme for Math Awareness Month - it's Math and the Climate! Held every year in April, Mathematics Awareness Month was started to make others aware of how math affects our world. DreamBox is celebrating all month long with articles about climate math and our free Math Awareness Month activities calendar!

Did you know that we beta-tested DreamBox Learning with 5 different releases before making it available to the public? Along with each release came a plethora of feedback. Feedback that was, and still is, vital to building a product that teaches and engages young kids. Along the way were many surprises.

Forget the boogie man under the bed. There’s a bigger problem out there. “My child is scared to try new things that are hard for him.” At DreamBox, we hear this quite a bit. And I believe it’s a problem all parents should attack with muster. Why? Because learning to persevere through a tough problem is a life skill that will serve every child well, now and forever. So how does a parent address this? Every child is different. Experiment with the ideas below and figure out which best suits your child’s temperament.

As a teacher I often used software in the classroom. Much of this software relied on me to determine the appropriate starting place in the curriculum. Every year I’d add my class list and determine which objectives I wanted to address for each student. Often I’d do this in August as part of my preparation for the new school year, which means I hadn’t even met the kids. Plus, we all know about the loss of knowledge retention that occurs over the summer. How was I supposed to know what each student did and didn’t need?

I never liked this game, not even as a kid. However, I recognize the positive benefits of playing games with my 3-year-old Elle, and I could never deprive her of this experience. No matter how painful. However, I’ve recently been saved from some of this pain. I must thank Geetha B. Ramani and Robert S. Siegler of Carnegie Mellon University for their article Promoting Broad and Stable Improvements in Low-Income Children’s Numerical Knowledge Through Playing Number Board Games.

I am a DreamBox teacher as well as the parent of a pre-schooler. I must confess there are times I have a hard time not helping him play DreamBox. He really enjoys playing and he is learning a lot. But there are times when the games are challenging for him.

Who says Valentine’s Day is only about Hallmark and sugar? Classrooms can find creative ways to expand this holiday into a great learning opportunity. Try having your class send a valentine to their favorite number! This can be a great thing to put up on a bulletin board for the day of the big party.

Recently, a friend of a friend who had reviewed our offering wrote to me and said, "Overall I find the business model of a monthly charge very strange for a children's learning software. Usually one buys a book or a CD/DVD for a one time price and can use it indefinitely. DreamBox's offering basically means that now parents need to pay over and over again if their kids want to revisit lessons or if they are just slow learners. A more appropriate pricing model would be to sell the service per lesson or grade level. That would appeal a lot more to me. Think about it. I have to spend $100 for one year of service and after that I basically lose access to the learning tools unless I continue paying. For $100 each year I get many learning software on CD/DVDs or books and I can keep them forever. That is a very easy decision in my mind."

Here at DreamBox, we recommend for best results that a student play at least twice a week for 15 minutes at a time. Some will play more. However, like Vitamin A, a lot more is not better. To take an extreme, a child playing 3 hours a day every day is crowding out too many other activities for a happy child.

I was at conference recently discussing DreamBox with a pretty savvy industry insider when she asked “what makes your product so unique?” My response was “It’s incredibly effective, fun, and highly individualized to a child’s particular learning needs.” That’s when she said it. “Individualized?! That’s what they all say!”