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As learning becomes more and more prevalent in the minds of young minds, clear efforts are made to make the journey as smooth and engaging as possible. And this endeavour is only echoed in maths – the subject serves as the cornerstone for many educational curriculums. Though, a growing concern has caught the eye of educators and parents alike. The design of maths workbooks for elementary school children is seemingly doing more harm than good. Filled with colourful shapes and visuals, the books are taking already-distracted children through a world of numbers and equations. What should be a smooth journey of enlightenment starts to resemble a maze, filled with endless distractions where children are unable to familiarize themselves with one concept before being thrown into a whirlwind of another.
The Over-decoration Challenge on Maths Workbooks
Opening a book, expecting to receive guidance on a new subject and being met with a sea of colours, shapes and pictures. To adults, this might initially sound like a splendid idea — but for elementary school children who are in the process of learning their maths fundamentals, it can be a little overwhelming. The issue here is that children are a naturally curious breed which only means that when presented with something visual, they immediately gravitate towards it and that’s where the problem arises. This curiosity can be a blessing in some cases but in many more, such as with maths workbooks, their vision should be fixated only on the task of the maths problems themselves.
In defence of the people behind these design decisions, they’re probably just trying to make maths as much fun as possible for children. They want to create an educational environment that captivates children and makes them want to move through it. Yet in the end, the decorations come to overshadow the true essence of maths. Children are left navigating a forest of distractions trying to find the path that leads to understanding the concepts they’re being taught.
Another critical aspect that needs to be called out is the structure of most of these maths workbooks. In their attempts to cover an expansive curriculum, these books often jump from one topic to another with hardly any breathing room in between. This rapid switch can be jarring for young learners. It’s like they’re being asked to run before they’re fully able to walk. Every new mathematical concept builds on the previous one, and without a strong foundation in the simpler topics, upward progress becomes very difficult.
This approach can easily lead to notable gaps in a child’s maths education. Instead of mastering a concept before moving on to the next one, a child may have just a passing understanding of many different topics. The end result is confusion and a lack of confidence in their abilities, which can have a significant impact on their educational journey moving forward.
So, what is the answer? Well, it’s a little complicated, but it begins with finding the middle ground. The key is to simplify. A kids’ maths workbooks for early elementary students should be visually engaging in its cleverness, and not overly in its complexity, to do so, the number of irrelevant visuals has to be cut back, resulting in an easier-to-follow and comprehend presentation for the students who use it.
It’s not just the content of these books that bothers me; as a parent, I understand that kids often need to repeat a concept many times for it to sink in. More important than cramming precedents into one book is the pacing. A slower progression, allowing kids time to fully digest one concept, is vital.
This might mean fewer subjects covered in a single book, but with a depth of understanding that is orders of magnitude deeper.
Concrete Steps Forward
The tasks of educators and publishers attempting to create excellent maths workbooks for this young and curious today could be relatively straightforward.
For one, including educators in the design process who have had direct experience teaching young children can be an invaluable piece to that elusive puzzle; input should also be coming from the kids themselves. (Who better to comment on the effectiveness of learning tools than those most targeted by said tools?) Additionally, for us as parents, choosing simple workbooks that follow clear progressions of concepts and that leave out all of the distracting decorations can go a long way in taking publishers a few steps back to a time before a mathtastrophe fell upon our nation.
Going further, families can take a page from home schoolers’ maths program and see how to do maths on a daily basis; worksheets will be just a small part of the rich world of contextual learning in maths!
In their defence, it’s clear that the creators of these workbooks had the best of intentions. Just as these books were written for kids, one would assume that they were designed to be fun and engaging. In embracing these goals, however, it’s time to reassess whether they’ve, in fact, been achieved. Ultimately, the most useful thing we can do is create fun, engaging and colourful workbooks that actually succeed in illuminating — not overwhelming — the subject matter. With a less complex design and a bit more patience in subject progression, you could equip children with the tools they need to navigate the world of numbers and calculations. And after all, the real joy in learning hasn’t ever been the mere distraction of glossy colours and shapes, but rather the awe in understanding — hopefully you’ll find a world with that future on the other side of your school’s heavy doors.
The Conclusion from My Side
As I began navigating through the maze of parenthood, one challenge stood out: finding suitable educational material for my 6-year-old son. This was particularly desperate when it came to the subject of mathematics, which serves as the gateway to developing critical thinking and problem-solving skills from an early age. Despite combing through scores of maths workbooks on offer, one thing became abundantly clear — they seemed to have been made keeping this realization in mind; they were either far too complex and in the process, robbed mathematics of the joy of learning, or too simplistic, serving instruction that was as good as rote memorization, leaving a fundamental understanding of mathematical concepts as completely secondary.
This gap between what I had and what I needed set me thinking. What kind of educational material would be perfect for young learners like my son? Workbooks that made maths as basic as it should be, but no less transparent about what it covered. If it was so hard to find, was it possible that its solution, I thought, should also be journeyed to create?
I started laying down a framework for maths workbooks, drawing from my son’s curriculum, feedback from other parents and extensive evaluation of educational standards for young learners to ensure that they were basic, engaging and installed at the right pedagogical pace for learners in the foundational years of their schooling.
Having done this, it only seemed logical that the workbooks would need to be shared with a wider audience and on this account, Amazon — given its vast reach and accessibility — was the perfect place to be. Publishing the workbooks on Amazon ensured that I was not only able to create an invaluable resource for my personal use but extended them to scores of other parents who I could sense, like me, were exhausted and desperate to find better educational tools for their children.
The effect was immediate and deeply fulfilling. Parents from across the UK emailed in to express their appreciation for the workbooks, sharing anecdotes about how the workbooks had turned their children’s antipathy towards maths into a newfound love for the subject. After receiving an encouraging thank-you letter from the head teacher of my son’s school for donating my workbook to all the teachers responsible for Year 1 and Year 2, I feel confident in creating more. It was an incredibly heartening affirmation that what had started as a personal quest to address my son’s educational needs had transformed into a small, but valuable, service to a community bound by the common concern of ensuring the best for their children’s educational journey.
