Has anyone taught calculus?

Early Learning Teaching Your Child Math
1

My husband took calculus when he was in collage and said it gave him a big headache. We want to teach it to our kids. He explained it to me and it sounds simple enough. I don’t remember it :laugh: but it sounded simple. I think we’ll get some books for us to read on it and figure out how to do it in a way the kids can understand. Does anyone have any advice?

For the kids: Probably not what I’m looking for but maybe a good starting place? http://www.amazon.com/Introductory-Calculus-For-Infants-Inouye/dp/0987823914/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1369267154&sr=8-1&keywords=calculus+for+kids

2

That looks like an awesome book!
There’s a whole slew of them, like http://www.amazon.com/Non-Euclidean-Geometry-Babies-Math/dp/1480203246/ref=pd_sim_b_1 and http://www.amazon.com/The-Pythagorean-Theorem-Babies-Math/dp/148200058X/ref=pd_sim_b_2, and some programming books.
I can’t help you on the calculus though- I only made it through Saxon Algebra II and Statistics 1010. But I’m going to figure it out as a student when my kids get there. I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it.

3

Oh my! I love these books. The cover letters and colors and shapes too.
I have a friend who was a math major who is expecting. I think baby needs these books!

4

We are using Introductory Calculus for Infants with my daughter. She loves looking at the different colours in book, and whilst flipping through the pages, I use voice-modulation, point to the various images and try to engage her. I quite like the book myself :slight_smile:

5

Thank you you guys.
I bought the calculus book for now and next month I’ll get the other books. I can’t wait to see them. They look cute in the samples.
I got some algebra and advanced calculus dvds from the library so I could get an idea and my 2 year old watched it better than most cartoons.

After getting a basic idea I think I’ll teach them angle degrees first, then algebra, trigonometry and finally calculus because you use all the things I just mentioned.

6

Try Calculus Made Easy, by Silvanus Thompson.

“Considering how many fools can calculate, it is surprising that it should be thought either a difficult or a tedious task for any other fool to learn how to master the same tricks. …

The fools who write the textbooks of advanced mathematics … seldom take the trouble to show you how easy the easy calculations are. …they seem to desire to impress you with their tremendous cleverness by going about it in the most difficult way.

Being myself a remarkably stupid fellow, I have had to unteach myself the difficulties…”

It can be freely accessed on gutenberg.org.

What one fool can do, another can.
(Ancient Simian Proverb.)

Chris.

7

Thanks for all the resources you have been sharing, Chris. I look forward to digging through that book. :slight_smile:

8

I was just telling my husband I think math is really easy if you have a good teacher.

Calculus for infants came today and it’s a really cute book! It’ll be really fun when we know what it’s talking about :happy:

9

I love how these books were titled as a joke but we’re still using them that way. We’re awesome.

10

I would hope that by the time the child is ready for calculus, he/she could either self-study the subject or take an online course. That is, the parents would not need to learn the subject first.

If your child might be a math whiz, I would recommend looking into the Art of Problem Solving Curriculum, http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/
My understanding is that they go deeper into problem solving/building the child’s mathematical intuition than your typical math texts (many of which are rote-based).

If you want to learn calculus yourself, why not try an offering from http://www.coursera.org? It’s free. You can download all the videos for viewing later. There is a discussion forum where you can ask questions and get answers if you are confused about something. And, if you have the time, you can do the homeworks/quizzes/exams to help you master the subject. But, there’s no commitment, so if you are busy, you can just drop it and not stress about it! And, even if you don’t have time for this one, you can join the course and just archive the videos for viewing later. I’ve found their lecturers to be pretty good and understandable.

There is a calculus course going on right now (it just started a few days ago, so you can join it still): https://www.coursera.org/course/calcsing
It seems like they will offer calculus a couple of times a year from different universities, so if you don’t catch this offering, you can catch the next one.
You can also take calculus from a number of different professors to solidify your understanding of the subject.

11

Hello,

First of all i would like to thank you all for all the useful resources you presented in this post.
I’m the proud mom of a 7 year old adorable daughter and i’m looking for fun ways to teach her math and catch her attention.
I found an interesting math game http://mymaths.net/ that i think is worth looking into.
I also found an youtube channel that has amazing videos: http://www.youtube.com/user/Vihart

I hope all this helps you:)

All the best,
Evy

12

I would not worry about calculus for the under 5 crowd. I have planned out a rough guide to math that I’d like my kids to study from. It touches on everything from counting to calculus by high school age. (Meaning you’d have a 14year old who knew some calculus.)

13

I just want to say that not only is it possible to teach the basics of calculus to a very young child, I highly recommend it. At the very, very least an introduction to terminology and the basic ideas in a fun way that ensures the kid will grow up comfortable with it!
My hubby and I have both gone through all levels of calculus and beyond, and I assure you that much of what people struggle with in math ( as well as science!) is the language and terminology. It is very much like another language. If you are sitting in a classroom and the professor is using specific terminology to refer to the problem, and you don’t even know that vocabulary, you are not going to even begin to focus on the problem. Your brain begins to shut down at the onslaught of unfamiliar language:)
For example: using language from simple arithmetic, if you not familiar with the language, and someone has lots of numbers on the board…they are attempting to teach you saying things like the following. Okay, you first write the minuend like so. Directly underneath write the subtrahend, making sure to align the ones, tens, and hundreds columns. Finally, subtract to find the difference. Etc.

Anyway, we started teaching Alex the barest of bare bones at about 2. It began with making sure she could read a bar graph, and then other graphs. We made sure to always refer to the x-axis and the y-axis. Then using more pre-algebra terminology for things like a line : learning the formula (rote memorization then), what a slope was…that takes you nicely into. 'Change '. How to change the slope of the line and so forth, and introducing functions.

Once the child is more familiar with arithmetic, it be ones easier. Once Alex understood multiplication and division it becomes much easier, but it isn’t strictly necessary to develop understanding. If you have access to a decent graphing calculator or graphing program, it is easy to enthrall them with possibilities, but again, not totally necessary.

I do have the Introductory Calculus for Infants book as well as the others in the series, and we do those at night. We read at least one ‘living math’ book as part of our bedtime reading, and this is a great time for those. For more of a system /fun supplement to our daily math we use Calculus by and for Young People book and worksheets and Calculus Without Tears. I will say that these both have a very homespun feel to them, completely different to the style of the cute series of math books. But they are great resources for a parent wanting to teach to a child.

http://www.amazon.com/Calculus-Young-People-Ages-Yes/dp/096216741X/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1373052869&sr=1-2&keywords=calculus+by+and+for+young+people

http://www.amazon.com/Calculus-Without-Tears-Learning-Students/dp/0976413809/ref=pd_sim_sbs_b_4

Edit: BTW, the author of Calculus by and for Young People, Donald Cohen, has a website with LOTS of great ideas for calculus and more advanced math topics. I referenced it in previous threads, but it has been awhile, so here it is again:
http://www.mathman.biz/

14

The thought of teaching Calculus to my kids makes me want to hyperventilate, but thank you Kerileanne99 for giving me a simple place to begin. Now off to get a graphed poster board for some fun time graphing and learning about all the parts of a Cartesian graph. I can handle starting there. :yes:

15

Really good help I have found here.