Make Maths Easy – 15 easy ways to teach your child the numbers game.
Number puzzle at petit bazaar
Maths teaches logic, reasoning and order. Today’s modern life makes it almost impossible to spend your day without using some Maths skills. You would need a basic understanding of percentages and fractions to follow a recipe, do grocery shopping or invest your savings.
Hence it is a great idea to expose children to some critical Maths concepts in the early years when their natural curiosity and absorption skills are high. Parents who grew up scared of Maths are often worried about how to teach their children to enjoy the subject. It is important to overcome your own Maths phobias and encourage your toddlers to have fun with numbers. Maths is a powerful tool to help in the development of the child’s logical and analytical skills.
Make Maths a part of your child’s daily life —through games, puzzles and a bit of creativity. Here are some easy ideas you can try at home, but remember to have fun with your child in the process:
1. Ask them to make pancakes with play dough and then cut halves, thirds or quarter pieces for you. You can do the same with fruits, jellies, just about anything they eat. This is an easy way to introduce them to fractions. Another idea is to give them a number of toys or stickers and ask them to divide it equally between siblings or friends.
2. Draw, colour and cut different shapes as a craft activity. Then ask them to identify different things around the house with those shapes. For example, a study table could be a rectangle. Identifying shapes is an important spatial concept and a foundation for geometry. Later, use these shapes as soft blocks to build a tower, and ask them to make a similar one next to yours.
Building Blocks will help your child learn shapes and spatial awareness
3. Size comparisons can be done anywhere —at the park, in the car etc. Which soft toy is bigger? Which bowl has more cereal? How many small and big coins are there in your piggy bank? Give them the clothes from the washing machine and ask them to sort out your and their clothes, and to match the socks.
Ask your child which toy is bigger and which is smaller…
4. Basic number recognition is a building block for bigger concepts like addition/subtraction. Play hopscotch with numbers — write big and small numbers and ask them to jump to numbers as you call them out. Make flash cards with cutout pictures of whatever your children love the most — could be Disney characters or dinosaurs.
5. You can give them fake money (cut out paper dollar bills) and ask them to make a supermarket list to buy with that. This will give them good money sense. Or alternatively, ask them to count out the real money notes to a cabbie or in a shop.
6. Ask them to write a rough schedule of their day in terms of the hour — what time they get up, have their meals, and have activities. This will give them basic time sense. It can be fun to figure out how long it takes to go to a friend’s house or to watch a cartoon movie.
7. Patterns are anything that repeats in a sequence. Talk about how daddy and mummy go away to work in the morning and are back in the evening. Or how the moon comes out after the sun sets. Small children feel secure and happy with established routines, so try to have a set time when they go down to play, have snacks etc. Then discuss those daily patterns with them.
8. Ask them if the food is on the table or under it, if Daddy is taller than the teddy bear, and which is the biggest toy they have? Is the TV inside the house or outside it? All this will give them a sense of positions and measurements.
9. Talk about changing seasons and point out if it’s raining, sunny or very cold. Discussing the seasons and associated weather changes will also make them familiar with the calendar. You can always hang a poster next to the window, where they can draw the sun, rain or clouds according to the weather they see outside.
10. You can help your child to develop a sense of direction by talking about maps and coordinates in the simplest way possible. Start by drawing grid lines on a blank paper and paste stickers on some of the intersection points. Ask them to trace the columns and rows with their fingers and name the intersection points where they find the stickers. By doing this activity a couple of times, they will slowly start learning how to read coordinates.
11. Help your children carry out a simple survey — perhaps give them a list of drinks before a party and ask them to put a tally mark next to each drink when a guest asks for it. At the end they can add up the tally marks and present to you which drink was the most popular. This will help them with basics of graphs and data interpretation and will be a fun and cool activity to do at a party.
12. You can take a simple toy like a jar of marbles and use it for a host of activities. Ask them to guess how many marbles are in there and then count them. Making estimates is an important concept and the building block to probabilities. Then take out a fistful of marbles and ask them to guess how many are left. You can even ask them to write down their guessestimate and the real number after counting. This will show them their error of difference.
This cool bean counter with chopsticks can be used to learn motor skills and maths skills
13. Make a number line and ask them to jump on alternate numbers, or clap hands when you call out alternate numbers. Doing this a couple of times will introduce them to skip-counting. Also if you change the starting point to 1 and then to 2, it will be a good way to introduce odd and even numbers.
14. Most children are very excited about their birthdays. Count with them how many months are left to their birthday, how old they will turn then and how old their siblings and/or friends will be by that time. You can count how many friends they want to call for the party.
15. To boost their confidence, ask your child to teach their siblings or friends some Maths concepts. They will LOVE showing off their newfound knowledge — and in the process stoke the younger ones’ curiosity as well.
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About the Author: Anuja Agarwal is an ex-banker who quit to spend time with her kids. She now runs Pinnacle Learning Centre www.pinnaclelearningcentre.com which is dedicated to financial-literacy for both kids and adults.
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