Parents need to teach estimation--and it can be part of Halloween fun. (Teachers are too busy teaching computation.)

Here's a great way to lower math anxiety, and give your child a big boost in understanding math concepts.

Estimating with Halloween Goodies
Inner Child Learning
October 14, 2013
by Leann

Halloween can be a fun time of year, filled with pretend play, decorating, and an over-abundance of candy. Why not put the candy to use, with a little learning exploration? Here’s a fun estimation activity that you do can do with just a bag (or two) of Halloween candy and a few glass jars.


Materials needed:

different types of candies or other related goodies
4 glass Mason jars
4 small jars or containers

The set up:

Start by putting different candies or goodies into each jar. I choose chocolate eyes and pumpkin candies, Halloween sweet tarts, and a bag of spider rings from the dollar store.

Count out a designated amount of items and place them into the small containers. I would recommend starting with containers that have the same width as the bottom of the Mason jars, so the kids can easily estimate using the height of the container (or height of the items).

How to teach estimating:

To begin, state how many items are in the small container. Try to keep it simple, by starting with simple multiples that they can count by. (We started with groups of 10 items.) Point out the height of the items in the small container. Then speculate “how high” the large jar is in comparison to the height you measured in the small container.

When we did this activity, I actually measured the height of the small container using my fingers. Mimicking me, my son did the same. He then easily count the height of the mason jar, and then count by 10′s to get to the approximate answer.

For example, I started by telling my son that there were 10 pumpkins in the small container. I pointed out how tall the container was with 10 pumpkins, and then showed him that I could estimate that 3 and a half more containers stacked up would equal the height of the large Mason jar. So, that would mean 10+10+10+5=35 would be how many were in the Mason jar.

After we made our predictions on the numbers in the jar, we then poured them out and counted them together. Amazingly, our predictions were almost exactly the number in the jar!

If this seems to be a little easy, then try a different approach — use 25 items rather than 10 in the small container. Or change up your containers so that they have a different width compared to the Mason jars. We also tried this, and it was equally as fun to try to guess the number, by trying to estimate how many might be inside. Another idea, which also builds “number sense,” is to make the questions multiple choice…. “Here’s 10 items. Do you think there are 50, 100, or 500 inside the jar?”

Anxiety Makes Brain Poor At Math For Some Children

Brains of Kids With Math Anxiety Function Differently, Says Study
ABC News
Mar 23, 2012

Kids who get the jitters before a math test may actually have different brain functions than kids without math anxiety, according to a new study.

Researchers from the Stanford University School of Medicine recruited about 50 second and third graders and separated them into either a high-math anxiety group or a low-anxiety group based on a standard questionnaire they modified for 7- to 9-year-olds. They scanned the children’s brains while the kids did addition and subtraction problems.

They found that children with a high level of math anxiety were slower at solving problems and were less accurate than children with lower math anxiety.
“Children who said they had math anxiety had greater responses in the areas of the brain implicated in processing negative emotions like fear, particularly the amygdala,” said Vinod Menon, a co-author and professor of child psychiatry, neurology and neuroscience at Stanford. “We also saw reduced activity in areas normally associated with mathematical problem solving.”...

“Math anxiety is underappreciated in young children, but it is very real and very stimulus-specific,” Menon said. “These children do not have high levels of general anxiety.”

...The findings, the authors said, could eventually be used to develop ways to address this specific type of anxiety, which “has significant implications for an individual’s long-term academic and professional success,” they wrote.



Anxiety Makes Brain Poor At Maths For Some Children
Medical News Today
23 Mar 2012

A study from the Stanford University School of Medicine is published this week in Psychological Science showing that children who experience difficulty with math exhibit an altered brain function from anxiety.

When it comes to equations and formulas, all you have to fear is fear itself it seems, with second and third grade students showing brain activity associated with panicky or frightened feelings, decreasing activity in the part of the brain that handles math...

Menon says that's its also possible for someone who is considered good at maths to have a bad day and feel the anxiety that blocks his or her skills...

The two groups of good math and bad math / anxious students showed differences in performance: Children with high math anxiety were less accurate and significantly slower at solving math problems than children with low math anxiety. These results indicate that math anxiety, basically math-specific fear, jams the brain's information-processing capacity along with the ability to reason through a math problem. Perhaps the process of being fearful, by way of the animal type survival mechanism it originates from, has evolved the brain to be spontaneous and intuitive rather than logical and mathematical in frightening situations...