Inspiring your child’s love of maths can be a challenge for many parents. Maths takes up a lot of brain power and concentration, which most children don’t think is much fun at all. It can also be a tricky subject for kids to understand, which means it’s even more important to practice outside of school as often as possible. We’ve come up with some fun ways to get your children excited about maths, so they start having fun with numbers and progress in the subject they may dread the most!
Play Maths Games At Home
Making maths fun is the key to improving maths skills and knowledge. Encourage your child to see mathematics as a game, not work, by playing logic puzzles, computer games, sports or family board games. There are loads of enjoyable games you can play such as dominoes, Monopoly, Yahtzee, chess, cards, Sudoku and memory games. If your child uses technology on a regular basis then why not find some maths learning apps? Our blog post here has some great app suggestions.
Read Books That Incorporate Maths
Encouraging your kids to read books that incorporate maths or logic is a great way to get them excited about it. There are loads of picture books for younger readers that incorporate these concepts, such as having the main character solve a problem using maths. For a list of fantastic maths story books ranging from addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions, shapes and probability click here. Or for more educational based books, this site has some great suggestions.
Use Maths In Real Life
Children love to learn, but often they need to understand how the knowledge they’re learning will be useful. Once your child can see how maths can be applied to real-life situations, they’ll probably become more eager to listen, ask questions, and actually start looking forward to learning the subject. Here are just a few ideas of real-life situations where your kids will either use maths now or when they’re older.
- Telling the time using digital and analogue clocks.
- Practicing times tables.
- Comparing prices of items in the supermarket such as cereal or jam to help pick the ones that are the best value for money.
- Budgeting a monthly salary for rent, food, bills and having money left over.
Try This: Encourage your kids to work out the following for some extra fun!
- How long they will need to save their pocket money to buy a particular item.
- How many miles will be driven in X hours.
- How long will it take to drive home going X mph?
- Add up the three numbers on car license plates while you’re in the car.
- Estimating the cost of all the items in your trolley during a food shop.
Spend Time Baking and Cooking
Maths is hidden in so many fun activities such as cooking and baking. Get your kids to weigh out and measure the ingredients next time you bake a batch of brownies or cook a roast dinner. It’s an easy way to familiarise them with counting, different measurements, fractions, temperatures and timings. Don’t forget to remind them this is one of the many ways maths can be fun- we bet they don’t even realise they’re using numbers because they’ll be having such a good time!
Be Excited About Maths Too
Many adults say they hated maths in school, however, even if this is the case, it’s important that you don’t communicate this to your child. Instead, help your child improve their attitude toward maths by showing that you’re confident when completing routine tasks like counting money, having a budget or estimating the cost of a purchase. It’s also important to explain the importance of maths in lots of different professions including architecture, medicine, fashion design, restaurant management, and computer programming. Small changes in how you talk about maths will have a huge influence on how your child thinks about maths. The more excited you are, the more excited they’ll be too!
