Let’s face it; math is not a pupil’s favorite subject. Most children and their parents hate math. They see math as a giant monster that sucks away all their creativity.
But, what if we say math is a great bonding activity for children and parents. And what if we say math is everywhere — from calculating money to negotiating with local vendors.
Math is a lifestyle. It is not just numbers or complex problems. Math helps you develop a logical mindset and build confidence in your child.
But how?
Well, parents, you have to first help your kids with math. Then, you have to use innovative approaches and activities to make math learning fun and exciting for your kids.
How to help kids with math – 6 innovating approaches
Let’s not scratch your head and see how you can help your kids with math for better learning and bonding.
Helping Your Kids With Math Is Beneficial For Their Intellectual Development — How?
Is your child slow at processing information? Does your child struggle to respond spontaneously or show creativity? If so, you should start helping them with math today.
Yes, logical and problem-solving math can encourage intellectual, creative, and cognitive development. When you start helping your kids with math early, this can lead to:
1. Stimulate Creativity
No matter what other people say, mathematics is the root of creativity. You can stimulate creative cells in your child’s mind with math skills. For example, when your child uses their imagination to create a paper plane from a waste paper, it shows their pattern and measurement assessment skills. Likewise, to create a simple origami art, your child needs to understand patterns, shapes, and measurement skills.
2. Initiates Enthusiasm
Math is not a buzz kill. In fact, when your child solves complicated math problems with ease, it will build their confidence and motivate them to learn new things. They will show more interest in their classes and display enthusiasm for other academic subjects.
3. Confidence Booster
Helping your child with math is essential to developing their confidence. However, when your child struggles to solve simple math problems, this will deflect their confidence, and they might lose interest in other subjects. Importantly, your child might refuse to go to school because they could not perform in math class compared to their classmates.
Therefore, when you provide the right assistance with math, your child will feel more confident and don’t hesitate to take on challenges. When they can solve problematic math equations with ease, this will give them confidence and courage to deal with other complex subjects like science.
4. Prepare Them to Take Down the World
Math is a universal language. Whether you are in Spain or India, you will use the same method to calculate grocery bills. You can prepare your child to travel around the world alone with math training. Math is an essential life skill that everyone needs to survive anywhere worldwide.
5. Cultivate Interest
Math is a foundation for many other career fields. For example, accountants need to learn fundamental mathematical calculations to create journals and balance sheets. Similarly, architects need to understand measurement and pattern equations to create sturdy buildings. Therefore, when you help your child with math, you are helping them to develop an interest in different fields. This can eventually help your child choose a future career path.
6. Social Value Development
Math has no religious or cultural boundaries. A scientific approach trains people to help humanity with better research and development. When your child knows how to solve some social issues using math skills, they can work to better society. Helping your child with math today can make them a better citizen of tomorrow.
How to Help Your Kid With Math? — 6 Innovative Solutions
Mathematics is vital for your child’s social, intellectual, and cultural development. But, we cannot ignore that teaching math from an introductory textbook is not fun. Simple numbers and word problems can quickly put anyone away from math.
Therefore, if you genuinely want to help your kid with math, you should use some innovative methods to teach them. Here are some exciting ways to make math fun and entertaining for you with children:
1. Never Demotivate Your Child
The worst thing that you can say to a child is — they are bad at math. Unfortunately, when you start saying in front of your children that they are bad at math, they will eventually begin to believe it and even stop trying to improve their math skills.
Therefore, you should always encourage your child to learn math. Even if they don’t get a correct answer on the third or fifth attempt, you should never say that you cannot do it. It would help if you motivated them to give it another shot and try different methods to approach the same problem.
2. Leverage Video Games
Every child loves to play video games today. So, you can use your child’s passion for video games to teach them math. Many great gamified platforms are available to teach math with animations and attractive videos. For example, SplashLearn is an excellent math game app to help preschoolers to 5th graders with math.
3. Use Various Math Activities
You can organize several math activities at your home to teach different math concepts to your child. You can invite over your kid’s friends and host group math activities.
For example, you can give your children and their friends a bucket. And ask them to fill it with different items like sand or rice. After that, you can provide them with a weighing machine to calculate the value present in each bucket containing various items. With this simple activity, your children will learn to calculate the value of different things and understand how to compute volume.
4. Cook With Them
Yep, cooking also involves calculation and measurement. It required measuring scale and common sense to create a recipe following the exact instructions. So, you can pick a complex recipe with lots of calculations, cook it with your child, and teach them math.
5. Practical Training
Once you teach a math concept to your child, you should take them out and show how this skill can help them in real life. For instance, once you teach your child how to calculate money, you can ask them to pay grocery bills.
6. Visual Lessons
Your child might need some extra time to process a math equation compared to other students. In that case, you can provide them with visual lessons so they can play, rewind and pause as many times as they want.
This way, they don’t have to wait for a teacher’s free time to ask for their help. Plus, many children hesitate to ask teachers a second time. So, visual lessons can easily allow children to learn at their own pace.
Besides this, if your child requires 1:1 math training and you don’t have much free time, you can hire a professional math tutor for them.
Let’s Bond Over Math!
When you and your child use different math activities, games, and practical training lessons to learn math, this will nurture a strong bond. In addition, this will give parents more opportunity to spend time with their kids, especially teenagers who no longer find their parents cool enough to hang out with.
Plus, helping your kid with math will develop their overall character. So, whether you have a preschooler or a high schooler, you should find an opportunity to help them with math.
Quick FAQs
Is it fun to learn math?
Yes, math learning is fun. When you solve a complicated math problem, it will provide you with sheer satisfaction and confidence. In addition, it will motivate students to try new methods and approaches to solve math problems. Plus, when parents and teachers make maths interesting for children, there is nothing more fun and entertaining than math.
How to help your teenager with math?
The best way to help your teenager with math is by introducing them to different math learning websites and applications. Since your teenagers are always using their mobile phones, thus, it will not be challenging to engage them with math applications. You can also show them YouTube math videos and motivate your child to join an online math club to solve some fundamental issues.
Source: Splashlearn
