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Welcome to adventurous math for the playground crowd! I am Moby Snoodles, and I love to hear from you at: moby@moebiusnoodles.com

Book news

There are just a few chapters left to illustrate. This should be all done by the beginning of October, when we start rounds of final reviews. If you would like to participate in reviews, drop me a note!

One of the main ways we make mathematics accessible to babies and toddlers is… symbols.

“Wait, what?” – you may ask. Isn’t symbolic mathematics harder than hands-on work?

It depends on what types of symbols we use. Here are a few examples.

“Baby signs” are hand gestures parents and kids establish for everyday needs of the baby, such as “Bring me that thing” or “More food” or “Pick me up.” Yes, a hand gesture is a type of a symbol.

Have you ever met a toddler who is crazy about horses, or in love with trucks? Anything referring to the beloved topic, such as a saddle or a wheel, will be dear to that child’s heart. Marketers know this and decorate pajamas, pens or backpacks with horseshoes or hot trucks. A saddle is not just a saddle – it’s a symbol of riding, caring for horses, and a whole world of interesting horse-related things!

Kids around the age of four of five often fall in love with particular colors. A child may only want to wear yellow shirts, or to build with yellow blocks and to draw with yellow markers. More often than not, colors have deep symbolic meaning to children. One mainstream example is “pink” symbolizing “ballet” for kids who love to dance. Sometimes these color symbols come from the media. For example, most cartoon characters have their colors, such as Batman and black. Of course, color combinations are symbols for a lot of things too – like green+red for winter holidays, or colors of its flag for a nation.

Here are two examples from the Moebius Noodles book. In the chapter on mirrors, we switched from formal symbols (numbers and multiplication signs) to visual diagrams that are more accessible:

And here are symbols for function machines in this incredible triple composition! Can you guess what the functions do? Three-year-old kids with whom we work can!

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Welcome to adventurous math for the playground crowd! I am Moby Snoodles, and I love to hear from you at moby@moebiusnoodles.com

Moby’s mail

I adored the responses to our last newsletter. It feels good when your work is supported and appreciated. Take a look at these examples…

I love the 3D function machine drawing. It makes me think of a train going up and/or down a large mountain, and every time the train passes through a tunnel the number of cars increases (or decreases). Thanks for sharing. – Ryan M. Combs, M.S., HRD, Instructional Design, eLearning Development, First-Rate Human Being

• How interesting, Ryan! We actually have a picture of a train doing just that later in the chapter. What an interesting coincidence – or maybe the chapter’s front picture evoked the same image both in you and in Ever, our illustrator? Wow… – Moby S.

These newsletters are so beautiful, and so full of goodness, I’m delighted each time I read one. I see, though, that Moby must be struggling a bit with English grammar. (Is Moby’s first language whalish?) I’d be happy to be your final copyeditor/proofreader, to catch those just before it goes out. Warmly, Sue VanHattum, Math Mama Writes

• Thanks, Sue! I would love this! The newsletters go out twice a month. I can send you the text a few days before the letter goes out. – Moby S.

“Welcome to adventurous math for the playground crowd!” Love that. Is it alright if I use “adventurous math” and “playground crowd” in the future? I won’t make it a tagline, but those are brilliant turns of phrase. – Paul Salomon, Math Munch

• Thank you for your kind words!  Yelena, the lead writer of “Moebius Noodles”, came up with this one. One of my favorite aspects of Yelena’s intrepid style is the bold, clear, but also metaphoric way she names entities such as math concepts, games, and in this case the main idea of the project. The whole project is Creative Commons, so you can share the motto too. I think it would be good if the idea of advanced math for the young kids – the playground crowd – spread as a meme! – Moby S.

Book news

One of the big challenges in making the “Moebius Noodles” book is the balance between three key types of the content.

1. Mathematics. We need to introduce topic-specific math actions. Our topics are way beyond “counting and shapes.” Many of the readers, even adults, have never seen this math or never thought that its deep roots can be made accessible for young kids.
2. Pedagogy. There are very few people in the world who work on making advanced math accessible to young kids. The lore on how to do it is far from being common knowledge. Last year at a conference in London, I met one of my pedagogy heroes, Richard Noss, who said it well: “Are you on the quest, too?”
3. Well-being. We are inviting people, who often suffer from math anxieties, into adventures in uncharted territories.  To help overcome fear and ease the anxiety, we provide some techniques for supporting cheerful disposition, mindful state of consciousness, and relaxed stance of the body.

You can conduct an experiment to see this. Several parents told me this experiment is an eye-opener because it shows how different, and bizarre, the young mind really is. Offer a young child a printed or drawn grid and ask them to draw a copy. More often than not, children will draw each cell separately, often forgetting about row/column structure altogether.

We have been nominated for a top site award at the Circle of Moms. We entered the voting late (just a day before closing), though. If you know of a good lists of resources we should be trying to join, please let us know!

Talk to you again on August 30th!

Moby Snoodles, aka Dr. Maria Droujkova