"Mathematics is, in its own way, the poetry of logical ideas."

— Albert Einstein

Ignite your child's enthusiasm for numbers by promoting creativity and fun through mathematical games, thus awakening a lasting interest in mathematics.

Of all the subjects we hear homeschool parents complain about, math is at the top of the list! Probably because many of us had negative experiences with math when we were in school. More than any other subject, math tends to be taught in an abstract way, leaving many kids wondering: what is the point of this? But math doesn’t need to be taught this way! We use math all the time in our everyday lives, and our children can too. Here are some ideas for how to make math more hands-on, real-world, interesting and enjoyable for your child, while also helping them to become more successful in math.

Apply it to the real-world!

Math doesn’t need to be abstract! By integrating math into everyday activities your child will not only understand math more easily, she’ll see how it is relevant to their life. Measuring ingredients for a baking project, following the score of your favorite sports team, calculating how much you need to save for a coveted toy, creating a daily schedule, calculating time, keeping score in a board game, calculating distance on a road trip, figuring out how many days until your birthday, dividing a cake evenly....the list is endless when it comes to ways to incorporate math into everyday life.

Connect it to what your child loves

Turbo charge your child’s interest in math by combining it with their hobbies and passions.  Does your child love arts and crafts? There are many ways to incorporate math - from creating beautiful patterns using the fibonacci sequence or crafting colorful mosiacs, to designing clothing for your favorite dolls or creating a city out of cardboard (all of which involve measuring, addition/subtraction, calculating areas/perimeters etc). If your child loves soccer, incorporate math while following live games, calculate the angle at which the ball enters the goal, analyze probabilities that a given team will win, or dive into the statistics of your favorite player. For kids interested in cooking there are all kinds of ways to incorporate fractions, multiplication (ask your child to triple a recipe, for example) and ratios. Is your child a budding gardener? Math is present in all kinds of ways when you develop a garden - measuring the area of planter boxes, calculating the volume of soil needed, calculating the cost of seeds, measuring plants as they grow, dividing the harvest evenly among family members, the options are endless!

Make math tangible

There is a lot of evidence to show that kids understand math better when they can experience it in a hands-on way. There are all kinds of math manipulatives that you can buy (or create at home) to help demonstrate math tangibly. These include Cuisenaire rods to help demonstrate the distance between numbers (e.g. how many 2s are needed to make 10), Base Ten Blocks to help visualize the relationship between numbers (e.g. 1 ten is the same length as 10 ones), Rekenreks counting Frames to help develop counting, addition & subtraction skills,  fraction tile & fraction circles to help visualize fractions and Geoboards to help with geometry. If you don’t want to buy these, a quick google search will help you to find ‘virtual’ versions of these tools. You can also create many of these at home using household materials like beads, blocks, legos and magnatiles.

Talk about & celebrate math at every opportunity

Many of us incorporate reading and writing into all aspects of our child’s day but then limit math exposure to just a few hours a week during ‘school’ time. But opportunities to talk about math pop up all the time in our everyday lives. Next time your child asks ‘how long until we get there?’ don’t give them the answer - ask them to figure it out by telling them the remaining distance and the speed of the car. When they ask: “how long until dinner?” have them figure it out. When they point to a desired food item in the grocery store, ask them to tell you the change they’d get if they purchased it with CHF10 before agreeing to buy it for them. By encouraging your child to use math at every opportunity, you’ll signal how much you value math. Be mindful, however, of the language you use when talking about math. Be careful not to say things like “math is really hard” or “I get it, I didn’t like math when I was a kid either” or “don’t worry, lots of kids are not good at math”.

Make it a game!

There are many board games, card games and even video games that incorporate math while also helping your child to hone their problem solving and strategy skills. Some great math-rich games include: Uno, chess, dominoes, cribbage, checkers, Yahtzee and backgammon.

Flex your child’s creative muscle

Math can be a highly creative subject and a great way to develop your child’s problem solving skills. Deepen your child’s understanding of math by creating fun challenges that have no clear answer. Fill a jar with hundreds of M&Ms or stones and ask your child to suggest ways to figure out how many there are. Pick up a handful of sand at the beach and devise ways to estimate the number of grains in a given area. Next time you drive by a high rise building, take turns estimating its height. As you picnic under your favorite tree, try to figure out how many leaves it has (attempts might look like: “well, I guess it has 30 branches, and that each branch has about 50 smaller branches, and each of these has 100 twigs and each twig has 2 leaves”) or as you sit in a large stadium, try to figure out the number of seats.

Encourage Mental Math & Estimating

In school we’re generally taught to solve math using pen and paper (or calculators) and yet in real life we often need to calculate numbers in our heads. Helping your child to develop their mental math is an important skill that will not only serve them well in adulthood. It will also help them to build confidence with numbers and provide them with a way to check their work to see if it makes ‘sense’. There are many great strategies for helping your child to add, subtract, multiply and divide in their head more quickly. This site provides a ton of great suggestions and it’s worth trying different approaches with your child to see which they prefer. But, as with everything, practice is key so find ways to help your child regularly flex their mental math muscles. For kids interested in sports - following sports teams and scores is a great way to regularly practice mental math (“how much does team x need to score to catch up with team y?”). There are also some great apps for practicing mental math; one we like is Math Brain Boosters. Another way to practice mental math is to ask your child to do rough mental math to ‘sanity check’ their pen and paper math. For example, if your child has just calculated 280 + 315 + 490 on paper, ask them to use rounded numbers to santity check their answer (i.e. 300 + 300 + 500 = 1100). Estimating and sanity checking answers is a hugely important (and often overlooked) skill in math.

Take it nice and slow

One of the great gifts of homeschooling is that you don’t have to rush your child’s education; you can really take time to ensure they fully understand concepts before moving on. Sadly, most schools do not have this luxury and thus many kids are forced to learn new concepts before they’ve fully grasped previous ones. This is especially detrimental in math where so many concepts build upon one another. When it comes to math, take your time to ensure your child really grasps and feels confident before moving onto new concepts. This may initially result in your child moving slower than their ‘grade’ level but later on it’ll enable them to move faster. Part of ‘moving slowly’ means taking time to ensure your child fully grasps the ‘why’ and ‘how’ of math before jumping into solving problems. For example, before exposing your child to multiplication tables and having them learn their multiplication facts, first show them tangibly (i.e. with real objects - in our house M&Ms were a hit!) what multiplication is - i.e. 7x5 is represented visually by creating 7 groups with five objects in each group or 5 groups with 7 objects in each group.

Bring on the music!

When it comes to memorizing math facts (especially multiplication tables) we found songs to be incredibly helpful. A quick youtube search will yield all kinds of catchy songs (both German and English options) to help your child memorize their multiplication facts. Try a few with your child to see which they find to be most catchy.

Project based learning with math as the hero!

We are big believers in the value of project-based learning (PBL). PBL makes learning feel more relevant because it focuses on solving real problems. It makes learning interdisciplinary - which better mimics how the real world works. And it helps kids to develop important skills like time management, goal setting and prioritization. Yet math is frequently left out of project-based learning because it’s less obvious how to combine math with other subjects. We think there are many fun ways to combine math and PBL! Below are a few ideas but the options are nearly endless. For more inspiration (and a whole bunch of ready-made projects) check out this great list.

• Ask your child to design their dream bedroom, dream house or dream playground  - this will require geometry, measurement, area/perimeter, arithmetic and multiplication, in addition to design, art and even environmental science (if you ask them to make it eco friendly!). You can bring in even more math if you give them a budget and a list of materials (with hypothetical prices) and ask them to furnish their room or house within a budget. Your child could use pen and paper to sketch their design or try out a digital design tools like Room Sketcher. And you don’t even have to design the project yourself! The website teachers-pay-teachers is a great resource for ready-made ‘build your dream room’ projects.

  
  

• Task your child with planning their dream roadtrip. They’ll need to research destinations, calculate distances between towns, develop a budget for hotels, food, fuel and activities and create a daily schedule. It’ll be even more fun if your family actually does the roadtrip! For some ready-made examples, check out these options.

  
  

• Bring out your child’s inner entrepreneur by encouraging them to start their own business. It could be selling homemade cookies on your street, or an online business such as creating an Etsy shop to sell artwork or tshirts. Either way your child will need to figure our pricing, calculate revenues and expenses, provide change, learn about basic economic concepts like supply, demand, profit and investment capital and also try their hand at sales and marketing.