When we just started unschooling I soon learned that children learn best if you let them follow their interests. I had my doubts about math though… I just couldn’t believe that children would find anything math related interesting and would start adding and subtracting and learn time tables just for the fun of it. How wrong I was… The reason, I couldn’t believe that math could actually be fun, was that I had never really liked math myself; I just couldn’t see how math could be useful. When I tried to teach my children math they didn’t like it either. It didn’t matter who hard I tried to make it fun - teaching them timetables with M&M’s that they could eat afterwards for example - they didn’t like it because they didn’t see any use for timetables in their lives. When I stopped teaching them math, my children taught me that math is everywhere around us and that it becomes much more interesting once you don’t see it as a separate subject anymore, but as a part of everyday life. I have always been convinced of the fact that you can only learn something when you really want to learn. From all the things I supposedly learned in Grade School I don’t remember much. There’s one classroom moment that I still remember clearly though. The kids at school played a Dutch game with marbles at the time in which you had to guess if they had an odd or even number of marbles in their hands. If you guessed right the marbles became yours, but if you were wrong you had to pay them out in marbles. Now, the older kids sometimes took advantage of the smaller ones (who didn’t know the difference between odd and even yet) and when the teacher told us that she was going to teach us something that would help us win this marble game she had my full attention; I wanted to learn that. She then explained about odd and even numbers and that classroom moment is still vividly in my memory. Math isn’t Rutger’s strongest skill but he loves to play board games and especially Monopoly. We play Monopoly a lot and because he likes it so much, and he wants to win, it really helps him to learn to do the required math. In the game you can choose whether you want to pay a fixed amount of tax or a percentage and that’s why, one evening, the boys wanted to learn everything about percentages. They concluded that they would rather get a percentage of their dad’s salary instead of the fixed one dollar a week they were getting. We didn’t think that was a good idea, but boy they did do a lot of math that night. We learn about fractions by cutting pizza’s and the boys also like to help me bake and cook and do a lot of measuring in the kitchen. They are most motivated to do math when it comes to money though; they do a lot of adding and subtracting to find out how long they have to save up for a certain toy. I don’t think that it makes any sense to make children remember timetables. What I also remember very vividly from my Grade School years is that a teacher once told my parents that I always forgot how much 8 times 7 was. Because the teacher had said so, I believed that was true so whenever I was asked who much 8 times 7 was I just went blank. By now I know it; it’s 55 isn’t it? or was it 57? It would have been a lot easier when I could’ve just find out by myself at a moment I was interested to know and ready to learn.