Community Mathematics Project: Parents as Mediators of Mathematical Learning

Parents play a vital role in shaping the ways young children understand the world around them. This paper reports on how the Community Mathematics Project (CMP)--a mathematics tutoring program for parents of diverse young children--affected the ways parents engaged in mathematical sensemaking while using virtual manipulatives and questioning to develop mathematical thinking. Further, we describe how these parents engaged with their children in daily activities and funds of knowledge in the form of at-home activities to contextualize mathematics word problems. We share stories on how parents and young children engaged in conversations around mathematics, and we provide examples on how these parents' lives were already mathematically rich and the CMP simply helped them to connect to mathematics more explicitly.