How do I improve my math skills?
Given the important part, maths plays in our daily lives, from calculating how much time it may take approximately to finish a task to working out the shopping budget for the week, our children need to develop sound mathematical skills at a young age. The best way is to incorporate maths into normal parts of their everyday life so that it doesn’t ever feel like they are actually being taught anything.
If you are struggling to find ways to help enhance your children’s mathematical skills, the following 5 tips will hopefully help.
Introduce the Concept of Size
You can help children to understand size by highlighting things in your children’s lives and their sizes about them. For instance, draw their attention to how big they are compared to different chairs by asking if they could fit underneath their little plastic chair, and then asking if they can get under a dining room chair.
Read more – how to pass maths in South Africa
Discuss Numbers
It doesn’t matter what you are doing. Whether it’s counting cars of one specific color on the journey home from school, preparing the dinner table, or portioning up vegetables, always try to get children involved in it.
Assign Your Child Jobs Related to Maths
Children often pick up concepts better when there is some kind of activity involved in the learning process. Use this to your advantage and assign them a task, such as handing out treats or snacks to friends or siblings. Use the opportunity to talk about the numbers that are involved. Think about questions to ask them to stir their minds a little, like “how many sweets are there?” and then ask them to give one or two to everyone.
Put Things into Classifications and Categories
Another great thing you can do easily with your children is by gathering all their toys together you can help to teach them about categorising and also classifying items. You can suggest that they do it by type, size and colour. Lead by example to help give them confidence, by doing one or two yourselves.
Make everything relevant to their daily life, by saying things like “Let’s take the farm animals back to the farmer” and “Let’s park all your cars and trucks over in the corner there”. Most important of all, make sure everything is fun.
Cooking
To cook things properly, exact calculations and measuring are required. That is what makes cooking a great activity to help instil in your kid’s crucial maths skills. Where recipes you are following ask for a certain measure of sugar or flour, show them how to properly measure out a cupful and tip it into your mixing bowl. You can then let them do it for themselves, counting out the rest of the cups that are required.
Even just reading out the recipe and asking for your child’s help in getting the necessary ingredients and utensils can teach them about the mathematical processes at work without them even realising it.
Teach Them How to Identify Shapes
Shapes are all around us and makeup everything in our lives. The best way to start introducing shapes and teaching your children how to identify them is by cutting the basic shapes out of paper. Give your children the task of naming the shapes and then playing around with them, to see what smaller shapes can be used to make up larger shapes. How many triangles does a square contain? You can then also use different shapes to make real-life objects.
