Making Math Fun — and Relevant — At Home
Now that the majority of learning is taking place at home, many parents are struggling with ways to keep their children engaged and interested. It is different working on a project with friends at school vs. doing it on your own at home. Teachers are striving to come up with a variety of interesting activities for students to complete, but parents can help too.
There are plenty of ways that you can incorporate key skills into everyday life. Take a break from worksheets or online games and do some hands-on activities with your kids to build their math skills. This is also a great way to show them how what they are learning applies to the real world.
Cooking
Cooking and baking require a variety of math skills. Have your kids help you measure out ingredients. If the one cup measuring cup is dirty, what are some other ways they can make one cup? Want to double or halve the batch? Let them calculate how much of each ingredient you’ll need now. As things are baking or simmering, have them figure out what time it will be done using a clock.
Shopping
As you write out the grocery list for next week, get your kids involved with calculating the cost. Look up prices online and have them add it up. Do you have coupons? Great! Subtract the savings and find the new total. Compare the cost and savings on different products to determine which is the best deal. Tell your child you only have a certain amount of money to spend and see what you can buy without going over. You can do this with the purchase of anything — not just groceries. Teaching children how to budget and manage money is a skill that will benefit them their entire life.
Gardening
If you’re looking at adding a garden to the backyard, how much space will you need? What is the area of the plot? How many cubic feet of soil are needed to fill a raised bed? When planting seeds, let your children measure the distance between each one. Once again, this activity can be adjusted for other things — a new playset or an inflatable pool for example.
Time
Working with time is another essential math skill. Practice using an analog clock and figuring out what time it will be in 15 minutes or 90 minutes. How many minutes or hours of schoolwork have they done today? How many days have they been staying in place at home and how does that convert to weeks or months? How many days until the end of the school year?
Sports
Live sports may be on hold for now, but you can still talk about them! The NFL draft just happened, so discuss statistics related to different players or teams. Who has the best passing rate? Catching? Touchdowns? You can do the same with baseball or basketball looking at available data online. What players are they keeping an eye on based on statistics?
These are just a few of the ways you can use math at home — not including identifying shapes, calculating tips, or measuring building materials to create projects. The possibilities are endless. Let your children guide the way by using things that interest them.
If they need some extra help keeping up with their math curriculum, enroll them in Crafting Scholars’ online classes for one-on-one or small-group learning opportunities. Just because school looks a little different right now doesn’t mean they have to lose momentum. Contact us today to learn more about online classes in not just math, but English, history, and science too!
