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Math Sight Facts with Professor Sharma

In the hustle and bustle of an early elementary classroom, students are busy working on their reading skills and mastering sight words. Many of you have experience with teaching a child their sight words or perhaps learning them yourself as a young student. Examples of sight words would be:

the

of

is

and

Professor Mahesh C. Sharma wants the world of mathematics to have the same idea and concepts as mathematics through what he refers to as Sight Facts. These are addition facts within 10 that are the building blocks of all bigger numbers and tap into wired skills that have evolutionary beginnings.

In this video, Professor Sharma will teach us all how Sight Facts came to be and how you can use them to help children become confident and proficient in mathematics.

As a young man, Professor Sharma had an opportunity to participate in teaching mathematics and was stunned to learn that these older students couldn’t reason about the math fact x + 7 = 11 without counting on their fingers. This curiosity fascinated him ever since and caused him to uncover where the trouble begins.

x + 7 = 11

Counting on fingers is a common sign of mathematics struggles and points to a deficit in number sense (Chinn, 2017). The brain is wired to reason in quantity from birth. Two-week-old babies have a loose concept of “more” and as they interact with the world they begin to develop the ability to subitize (which means to see suddenly) a quantity.

The Origins of Sight Facts

Professor Sharma teaches us that humans are wired with a special set of skills at birth which are:

 

  1. Subitizing (see quantity quickly)
  2. Estimating with small amounts
  3. Sense of Space

From an evolutionary standpoint, we can see that these skills were and are essential to our livelihood. Scanning an open field when hunting for your next meal, you need to be able to accurately estimate if you are outnumbered.

hard wired math skills

Learn More from Professor Sharma

If you’d like to learn from Professor Sharma on a consistent basis, you are in luck! No only does he have fantastic videos like the one below but he also has a standing Zoom meeting where he teaches math concepts from the beginning of number all the way into algebra.ย 

Connect with Professor Sharma each Tuesday at 8:00 AM Eastern. Head to his website to grab the Zoom link and enjoy!

Visit Professor Sharma’s Website: Mathematics for All

 

๐Ÿ‘€ Watch More Episodes of Unlocking Dyscalculia ๐Ÿ‘€

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MFM Authors

Jennie Miller

Jennie Miller

Marketing Assistant

is our Marketing Assistant and content creator here at Made for Math. Jennie loves being part of a company that is working to make mathematics accessible to children with dyscalculia.