What do these have to do with mathematics? In this case, everything.
The University of Free State’s (UFS) Family Math initiative is a programme, funded by SANRAL and developed by the Science for- the-Future (S4F) employees at UFS. Dr Cobus van Breda, Programme Director for Science-for-the-Future, and his team established the S4F programme and Sol Plaatje University (SPU) is one of the partner universities.
The development of this programme considers the enormous challenges encountered by South African teachers which include, among others, a lack of resources, inadequate parental involvement and the challenge of discrepancies between the language of teaching and learning, and learners’ home language. The Family Math programme aims to address these issues by not only involving teachers, but also involves learners and their parents.
SPU was invited to collaborate on this project and Grade 3 teachers in the Warrenton and Jan Kempdorp areas attended hands-on learning sessions conducted by Dr Glynnis Daries, Head of Education Studies and Dr Tracey Herman, Lecturer for Psychology in Education in the School of Education. These sessions took place at the Andalusia Primary School in Jan Kempdorp.
In attendance were 29 teachers from 10 local schools as well as the Chief Education Specialist for Foundation Phase, Mrs Mosadie Kruger, and the subject advisor for Foundation Phase in the Francis Baard area, Mrs Ntoaki Mosinki.
The sessions allowed teachers to explore and ‘play’ with concrete materials such as paper fish and fishbowls to understand problem solving approaches, beans and a number-line to encourage mental math and fraction cards. All these activities are aligned to CAPS and can be used to facilitate various topics in mathematics.
The teachers then held parent workshops at their respective schools where parents sat with their children and together worked through the activities. This enabled parents (and in many cases grandparents, aunts, uncles or older siblings) to use the resources at home to assist learners to consolidate work done in class. This initiative was a huge success as parents became involved in their children’s mathematics education.