Name: Math from three to seven
ISBN: 9780821868737

Math from three to seven

This book is a captivating account of a 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.

What Hacker News says

_kbSep 2026

Math from Three to Seven by Alexander Zvonkin is a great read and example of this. It recounts experiences running a math circle for preschoolers and really highlights the value of play, curiosity, and open exploration.

From personal experience, and as noted here, this approach is valuable for everyone regardless of age. In the short term it's far more efficient to learn by having the right way 'pushed' to you. However, by taking the time to fail, repeatedly, and eventually 'pulling' that knowledge the tacit understanding you build has a depth that's hard to shortcut.

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lupireOct 2024

6 years ago and 10 years ago, with a few comments: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Math+from+Three+to+Seven

This book and the culture it come from are so influential, that many people who did "enrichment" have already been exposed to many of the activities in the book. Most famous may be the Scratch JR / code.org introductory computer programming, but with pencil and paper.

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sersiAug 2024

Also, having a kid is great to get you to learn new things. I want my son to learn to play an instrument, so I've finally been taking piano classes because I know that very few children of completely non-musical parents actually succeed in learning to play instruments. Learning piano has been a lot of fun, I have a blast playing simple things with him (he's still young) and learning some of my favorite music.

Likewise, after reading "Math from Three to Seven: The Story of a Mathematical Circle for Preschoolers", I've been having a lot of fun getting back into Mathematics because it's fun doing things like this together.

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abecedariusMay 2024

There's a book Math from Three to Seven which may be very relevant. Of course you're talking about more than math.

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Math-from-Three-to-Sev...

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thenobstaJan 2023

A plug for "Math from Three to Seven: The Story of a Mathematical Circle for Preschoolers" seems warranted here. It has great ideas for fun things to do with kids as well.

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/12689040-math-from-th...

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agentultraAug 2022

I think you have the right of it: it's hard to teach something like maths to someone who isn't curious or interested. And it is definitely difficult to hook someone's attention.

When my children were still babies and quite young I was reading Zvonkin's book, Math from Three to Seven. And when they reached that age I started playing games with them myself to try and introduce these ideas to them. Like Zvonkin I found that one of my kids was more keen than the other... but the only way to keep them hooked was to avoid the "M" word: maths.

What I think helped was to remind ourselves that we were playing games. Any time I went into an area that required calculation: determining some value -- they would catch on to that and shut down. However if we stuck to exploration and fitting things together and exploring games together I could keep them interested for an hour some days.

And as an adult that's what has kept me interested: Martin Gardners' articles in Scientific American and books; John Conway's playfulness (ONAG, the bloody game of life, etc) -- the stuff that wasn't simply rote calculation which I find many attempts at practical applications seem to focus on.

I can appreciate definitions and proofs now because I've learned the language well enough to piece things together. However it was the fun, the absurd, and the playfulness of the completely impractical that kept me going. Games, thought experiments, what-ifs. That sort of stuff.

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