Teaching Calculus to Third Graders

 Teachability is largely decided by the student. The student must make a consistent effort to be willing to learn math facts, and willing to accept change. Keeping things positive, and simple will be a constant objective. Do not teach them to hate the subject you are trying to teach.
Starting out, just try to teach them something. You do not need to rush, but you do need to make sure that the math facts you teach them, they understand as completely as possible.

 

 

 

Algebra Books	Algebra 2 Books	Basic Math Books
Calculus Books	Geometry Books	Math Games
Math Calculators	Math Workbooks	PreCalculus Books
Trigonometry Books

Starting out, just try to teach them something. You do not need to rush, but you do need to make sure that the math facts you teach them, they understand as completely as possible.

Teach addition, subtraction, multiplication,and division. Teach these basics in increasing depth and detail. All of the concepts, processes, and formulas of advanced mathematics are built on these basics, and the advanced concepts will be accepted by the third grade mind as learning more about the basics. Using this approach you can quickly take a student into calculus with a tightly integrated understanding of the concepts.

An example of this working is when I worked with Janet. When I was asked to start math tutoring with her, she was failing third grade math, and she hated it. We started slow, but then Janet became a good student, and then a very good student. Math secrets were unlocked, math tips were obsorbed, and she loved math tricks.

Janet’s thinking about math, from her public school education, was a mess. Her math workbooks were multiple guess, and confusing even to me. To avoid dealing with that, I had her start learning math at the beginning, redefining addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.

We went over many things I won’t bore you with, algebra, trig, geometry,except to say the math lessons became more challenging, she wanted more and more, faster and faster. She was amazing, and what astounded me most was that nearly all of the algebra we did, in the process of doing other things, was intuitive. She had amazing math problem solving ability, she just did it!

She was an incredible math problem solver. She analysed the problem, saw it for what it was, built the pieces she needed to solve it, put the pieces together, and solved it. Not bad for a third grader.

Janet was not thinking about this being difficult, to her math is fun. She enjoyed being challenged, to her solving math problems was a game.

Janet did that in seven weeks, imagine what you could do with a year.