How To Build Your Child’s Math Skills At Home

School isn’t the only place for learning math. In fact, there are many math lessons that are better taught outside the classroom. Whether your child is struggling or excelling at math at school, it could be worth trying out some of the extracurricular learning methods listed below to see what effect it has on your child’s education. It could be just the extra amount of learning that your kid needs to boost them to the next level.

Look up lesson plans online

You can teach kids your own math lessons by looking up lesson plans online. There are sites you can sign up to that have many fun summer math activities involving puzzles, games and drawing. Consider looking into these resources - you may be able to find activities related to topics that your child struggles with such as subtraction or fractions, which could help give them that boost they need.

Read books that incorporate math

There are many kids’ books that incorporate math. If your kids love reading, these can be a fantastic way to teach math skills. Experiment with some of the books - whether you’re reading them to your kids or they’re reading them themselves (a chance to develop reading and math skills).

Sing number-related songs

There are many popular kids songs that can teach kids numbers and counting such as ‘Ten green bottles’, ‘The ants go marching’ and ‘five little speckled frogs’. You can find many of these songs on YouTube with animated videos. There are also lesser known math-related songs that you can look into to teach everything from shapes to multiplication. Some of these could be worth playing to your kids.

Play board games and card games

So many board games and card games can teach basic math skills. Try games like Pairs and Snap to help very young kids identify numbers. Games like Dominoes, Top Trumps, Higher or Lower and Uno can meanwhile teach kids counting and relationship between numbers, while games like Scrabble and Monopoly can teach more complex math skills to older kids. The beauty of these games is that kids won’t even know that they’re learning - they’ll think they’re just having playtime. Just make sure to keep games suitable to a child’s age range as to not confuse them too much.

Put their math skills to practical use

There are many ways to teach kids math through practical everyday activities or hobbies. For example, if you love baking, getting your kids to measure and portion out ingredients can be a great way to build math skills. When shopping on a budget, you can meanwhile help kids to look at prices in the store and work out the cheapest option, or even ask kids to help you tally up the cost of each item as you put it in your basket. You can also teach kids to read the time and help them work out how much time you have left if you are waiting for food to be ready or waiting for a bus.