Mathematics can be a tricky subject for kids, and one we often remember well as adults if we also struggled with it at school. Developing confidence with the subject can take time, but once children get the hang of it, it will benefit them in so many ways including enabling them to use numbers in everyday life. If your child is finding it a bit tricky, here are some top tips on how to support them to overcome their struggles from a junior school in Surrey.
Talk about maths positively
Even if you found maths difficult yourself, it’s important to be positive about it and not let your own experience impact on how your child views it. Often we try to empathize by saying things like “I wasn’t good at maths either”, but that can lead your child to think that it’s a subject you’re either good at or you’re not, and therefore there’s no point trying to change it.
It’s better to say something like “I found maths hard but I worked hard and got better at it over time.” This communicates to your child that one’s maths abilities are not set in stone and can be improved, so it’s worth putting in the effort.
Use everyday tasks to practise
Practice makes perfect, so give your child opportunities to use maths when you’re completing everyday activities like shopping or cooking. You could ask them to help you count change or work out how much you’ll have left once you subtract the cost of an item from how much money you have.
When cooking, encourage your child to get involved in weighing and measuring ingredients, and converting measurements and working out timings. If you can bring maths into an activity your child really enjoys, they’ll be more likely to understand and retain the information. Another great option is to hire a statistics tutor to help your child even more.
Explore maths through play
Activities like making models will help your child learn about dimensions and shapes and how they relate to one another, as will stacking blocks and building with Lego. Water play is great for learning about volume, weight and capacity, particularly if you give your child different containers to fill and ask them to guess which ones will hold more water.
Even playing with cars helps with maths skills such as sorting and sequencing, as will asking them to pair their mismatched socks when they come out of the tumble dryer!
Maths is all around us, and helping your child to find it in everyday tasks might make them see that it’s an important part of life and nothing to be scared of.
