About this ebook
professional mathematician's experiences conducting a math circle for
preschoolers in his apartment in Moscow in the 1980s. As anyone who has
taught or raised young children knows, mathematical education for
little kids is a real mystery. What are they capable of? What should
they learn first? How hard should they work? Should they even "work" at
all? Should we push them, or just let them be? There are no correct
answers to these questions, and the author deals with them in classic
math-circle style: he doesn't ask and then answer a question, but shows
us a problem--be it mathematical or pedagogical--and describes to us
what happened. His book is a narrative about what he did, what he
tried, what worked, what failed, but most important, what the kids
experienced.
This book does not purport to show you how to create
precocious high achievers. It is just one person's story about things
he tried with a half-dozen young children. Mathematicians,
psychologists, educators, parents, and everybody interested in the
intellectual development in young children will find this book to be an
invaluable, inspiring resource.
In the interest of fostering a
greater awareness and appreciation of mathematics and its connections
to other disciplines and everyday life, MSRI and the AMS are publishing
books in the Mathematical Circles Library series as a service to
young people, their parents and teachers, and the mathematics
profession.
Titles in this series are co-published with the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI).
