Assistant Principal
As a parent, you can help your child be a whiz at Mathematics, even if it wasn’t your best subject. Here are tips for parents on how:
Be positive about Mathematics. Express confidence in your child’s ability to do maths. Don’t stress about your own fear of maths, how difficult maths is or how much you admire anyone who can do maths. Remember, everyone can and does use maths all the time.
Show your kids maths at work in their world. Get your kids to use maths by thinking out loud when making calculations. Then, let your children work out some real-life puzzles themselves. For example:
- Let them measure when you bake/cook.
- Ask them to figure out what length of hose you need to reach from the tap on the side of the house to the garden.
- Let your child figure out how many kilometres you’ll be driving on your next trip by using the information on a map.
- Sort silverware by knives, forks, and spoons. Sort cards by suit or numbers.
Make maths a game. Maths games are fun and inexpensive. They are a wonderful way to get your kids to enjoy working with numbers, as well as improve their number skills. Here are a few suggestions:
- Many games that we take for granted are excellent maths lessons. “Go Fish” teaches counting and grouping in sets. Games that use play money teach how to make change. Board games that use dice teach addition and counting. Backgammon teaches addition, subtraction, and strategy.
- Beans, stones, or marbles can be used to play number games. Let your child develop his or her own games by sorting beans into different sizes or types, setting up the rules for a counting game, or using different types of pasta to make a picture.
- Give your children a geometry lesson by letting them create a collage of circles, squares, and triangles. Challenge them to come up with as many different shapes as they can using only triangles.
- Play shop with the items in your cupboard.
- A pan of water and some jars or cups of different sizes will amuse a child for hours while teaching capacity and volume.
Mr Green
Assistant Principal
