Unschooling Math With a Six Year Old

My little J has been quite interested in math lately. Unlike W he has not had to endure me shoving worksheet after worksheet in front of him daily and so has been able to develop a natural curiosity about the world of numbers.

For the last several months he has been focusing his energy on learning to count money. Almost every day he would bring all of his money out and ask if we could count it together. And so we did...over and over and over. We also counted how many coins he had, sorted them by color and size and figured out how much he would have with "this" and the allowance he was expecting in a few days.


He's recently discovered that there's more to life than money and is now finding clocks, telling time and Roman numerals fascinating. Telling time I understand but Roman numerals is not something I was ever interested in as a kid. However now that I'm a grown up I'm enjoying learning them right along with him.

Here's one of the books we've been reading together. I found it at a book sale cheap!

It's so fun for me to see the boys learn and discover things they're interested in. I really was one of those "unschooling skeptics" who thought, "What if they don't want to learn math?" I'll tell you what I've decided...lots of people don't want to do math when you present them with an unending supply of worksheets...but math is every where and if you live and work (or play) in our society it is absolutely unavoidable and sometimes even fun to learn about!

If you know me at all you know that I've come a long way in my thinking (about math and about homeschooling!)

Hope you're having a fun (and math) filled day!