Educational newsletter aims to make math fun

Kent Haines says next to reading, math is one of the most central topics to academic success. 

A Homewood resident and nine-year math teacher, Haines is able to teach different concepts to his eighth-grade math classes at Simmons Middle School. However, the earlier children can catch on to mathematical concepts, the better they’ll be able to process those concepts as they advance through school.

As he and his wife began having kids, Haines began looking into early math development for young kids and getting advice from other parents and educators, but he realized the focus was mostly on reading and few had suggestions on helping children develop math skills. With this in mind, he began to ask himself, as a math teacher, what did he want parents to know?

“In talking with other math teachers, the idea of games came up, because games are inherently mathematical. Games have structure, they have rules. Anytime a game has rules, it has limits, it has constraints, and constraints are mathematical. Any time you have to count spaces or roll dice or decide if this matches that, you’re deciding some form of mathematical thinking,” Haines said.

By playing games with children and asking them questions about the moves they make and the way they think about those moves, Haines said parents can provoke mathematical discussion. 

This led to the creation of the Games for Young Minds email newsletter. Currently read by more 1,000 subscribers, Haines presents a new game each week and details how to play the game, explains some of its mathematical ideas and creates a list of questions to ask children while playing.

“I try to feature a wide variety,” Haines said. “I’ve featured some classic games like Connect Four and Sorry, Rummikub — things that have been around for decades and that people are familiar with because they might already have them around the house.”

Haines’ newsletter also features lesser known games with a heavy mathematical influence. One that he mentions is Zeus on the Loose, a card game where children use addition principles to count by 10s. 

The newsletter will often alternate its game features between commercial board games and free games that parents can create with household items. The games are typically geared toward children in kindergarten to second grade, a time period where children don’t typically have homework but could work on enriching certain skills at home.

“Normally when people think of a math game they think, ‘Oh, I’ll let my kid be the banker in Monopoly,’ or something like that. Something that involves a lot of numbers, adding, subtracting,” Haines said. “That is math. But there is more to it. One of my goals is to broaden the definition of what counts as math.”

Parents interested in subscribing to the newsletter can sign up at gamesforyoungminds.com to have it delivered to their email inbox on Thursday mornings.