As Winnie Cooper in the hit TV series The Wonder Years, Danica McKellar played a young girl growing up in the turbulent sixties. Now 45, McKellar is the mother of a nine-year-old boy growing up during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Fred Savage and Danica McKellar in the hit show, The Wonder Years.
Here, the child-star-turned-mathematician-mother gives us some insight on how to rear children, among other things. She home schools her son, Draco, and writes math books for kids. McKellar still acts, though, mostly in Hallmark Channel productions.
Following are edited excerpts from a recent phone conversation.
Jim Clash: I hear you wrote a song about the number pi.
Danica McKellar: Years back, I did a series called Math Bites, and in one of them I wrote a song about pi. You can find it on my website mckellarmath.com. I had been writing the song for about a year. These things take time [laughs]. It includes 139 digits of pi. I wrote it so that people who want to learn pi can have an easier time.
Clash: How many digits can you recite to me right now? I know it out to about 30 digits myself.
McKellar: Sure, but I’m a little out of practice: 3.141592653589793238462643382379…
Clash: Okay, okay, you are correct [laughs].
McKellar: Well, it’s a good thing I didn’t just rattle off random numbers!
Clash: Of the 10 children’s math books you’ve written, which is your favorite?
McKellar: I have two favorites: Kiss My Math, and the one that just came out, The Times Machine. There was something about the writing process with Kiss My Math and how it all came together. It’s fun but teaches really important stuff, like solving for x, and things that might be considered scary like negative numbers, graphing inequalities, etc.
Danica McKellar’s new book, The Times Machine
In The Times Machine, I teach multiplication and division for second through fifth graders, in a cartoonish, hands-on way. For example, six times seven is 42. That is one of those times tables that’s challenging for kids to remember. One of the characters in this book is Mr. Mouse. Imagine you have a six-sided block of cheese, huge. Mr. Mouse loves cheese so much that he’s going to eat one six-sided block every day for the seven days of the week. Well, at the end of that, he’s full, and farty, too [laughs]. I mean, a kid reading that, he’s not going to forget six times seven is 42.
Clash: When you were a child star in The Wonder Years, how did your peers react? Was it difficult?
McKellar: I was lucky in that I had really close friends before the show started. So I didn’t have to make new friends back then, then wonder whether they liked me just because I was on TV. That came up a little bit later, in college and stuff, but I was old enough then to figure it out.
Clash: Any advice for families cooped up during this pandemic?
McKellar: I want to reach out to all of the parents thrown into home schooling these days. I really feel for them. It’s a situation I chose for myself, but it’s not easy, juggling everything. A lot of people ask me how I do it, how do I get the kids to sit down and focus? So I created a set of videos posted on my Instagram page (@DanicaMcKellar). One of the highlighted circles there is called School at Home. If you click on it, you’ll see videos about things that work for me and my son, things I’m able to share with parents during these trying times.
