Teaching math concepts has been long considered a subject left for the classroom teacher, with many parents feeling unable or unequipped to help their child develop this skill. Parents already do many things with their children that can encourage mathematical thinking. Here are 9 tips for parents on how they can work with their child on math in a positive and fun way.
Tips to help your child with math
- Connect math to daily life.
Let your kids know the importance of math in everyday living. Talk about the ways you use math in your life and around the house. Show them a budget or how you pay the bills. Ask them how they used math during the day. - Have fun at the checkout.
Let your kids pay the next time you are at the store and ask what bills and coins are needed to pay for it. - Play games together.
Show them math can be fun and exciting. Play family games to add excitement to math activities, like cards, board games or games in the car such as license plate bingo or adding licence plate numbers. - Cooking can be counting fun!
Get older children involved in baking or cooking the family dinner and let them help measure ingredients for dishes or estimate the number of potatoes that are needed to feed everyone. - Play the estimating game.
Ask your kids to estimate measurements, distances, time and grocery bills. Be sure to compare the estimate with actual. Or get them to guess how much the apples you are going to buy will weigh and then take them to the scale in the grocery store and find out. - Figuring it Out.
Come up with a rhyme and ask your child to recite it as many times as possible in 15 seconds. After establishing how many times it can be repeated in 15 seconds have them multiply to establish how many time it could be said in 1 minute, 5 minutes etc. - Use common toys to understand math concepts.
Build a tower from blocks. Count the blocks. Then talk about the need for a base of the right size and the stability it creates. - Sports and math.
There is a lot of math used in sports: batting averages, points per game, save percentages – these are math terms that a sports enthusiast will love. If you watch a game with your child, read the newspaper report together sometime the next day and talk about the math concepts. - Computers games.
There are great computer games available for math and perhaps your child’s teacher can introduce you to the ones they use in class. There are also a wide variety of websites that have fun math games.
Working and learning math together with your child can be fun!
Using these tips will help make math fun! Parents can easily use everyday experiences to reinforce and develop mathematical skills and support their child’s learning of this important subject area.
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