The Family Work Card

A builder measures, a cook scales, a nurse times doses, a farmer estimates, a parent at home budgets and plans. Sit with your child and answer a few questions about the work someone in your family does, and the card shows the maths that is already in it.

The questions

Whose work, and what is it? What do you make, fix, grow, sell or look after in your work, paid or not? What do you measure, and with what: a tape, a scale, a cup, your hand, your eye? What do you count, and do you count in ones, in dozens, in boxes or in some other bundle? What do you estimate before you start: how long, how much, how many? What shapes, angles or patterns do you work with? Where does money, a price or a rate come into it? What goes wrong if a number is off, and how do you check it?

Skip any question; only the ones you answer go on the card. Answers are kept on this device so you can come back to them, and nowhere else.

The card

The maths we already do

Why ask about work

Education researchers who visited families at home found a great deal of knowledge in everyday work: building, repairing, trading, cooking, farming, caring. They called it the family’s “funds of knowledge” (Moll, Amanti, Neff and González, 1992), and the mathematics educator Marta Civil has spent years working with parents on the maths inside their jobs. A child who sees that the people they love measure, count and estimate every day has a door into school maths that is their own.

There are no right answers and nothing is graded. The card is the family’s, to keep or to give away.

Your answers are saved in this browser only, under sw.workcard.v1, so they are here when you come back. They are never sent. “Forget these answers” removes them.