How to help with...maths
There is more to maths than just doing sums. We use it all the time to do things like set the video, estimate journey times, cook and shop. In this instalment of Spark Island's 'How to...' guides, primary school teacher Sean Callery provides some practical ideas to boost your child's understanding.
In a nutshell
As adults, we do a lot of maths quite naturally, in our heads, but children need to start off in very practical ways, moving things around, touching them.
- Get your child interested in maths by showing that you use them in everyday life. As always, children learn loads through play - from using money to play shops, to holding abstract shapes in their heads for chess: most board games are great for building maths skills.
Check out these tips on how you can help your child with maths
Shape and patterns
Get started early on by showing him different shapes and talking about them. - Look at how many sides and corners a shape has. Draw round them
- Look at the patterns on clothes and what shapes can be seen in them.
- Draw a house with just a square and a triangle.
- Design flags using rectangles and triangles.
- Can he make two shapes that match, or are symmetrical?
- Children love finding the names for many-sided shapes (polygons) and colouring them.
- Use patterns to decorate cakes, using symmetry (as if there is a mirror in the middle) or sequences (colours always in the same order).
Move on to working in three dimensions. Use modelling clay or bricks to make shapes like cubes. Try to copy each others' shapes. How many different shapes can he make using the same number of building blocks? Can he make a bridge using only six bricks?
Time to learn
Some children can be brilliant at maths but really struggle with time. A watch as a birthday present is a good start, because a child who owns a watch wants to be able to tell the time. Make it one with hands, including a seconds hand (analogue) not just numbers (digital). This helps because the movement of the hands is a visual reminder that time is always changing. Start with the hours, then half hours, then quarter past, and have lots of practice on quarter to (much trickier, because you have to look for the next hour, not the last one).
Make guesses of how long it will take him to :
- run round the garden
- get to the shops
- tidy his room (you'll be so pleased!)
- write his name five times
Then, of course, see how long it really took. Go beyond minutes and seconds and learn the days of the week ('Your birthday is in 10 days, what day will it be on?') Play games using an egg or other timer, such as: 'How many fruits can you name in a minute?'
You can move on to looking at how digital time (the all-number kind) is measured to 24 hours in the day, to setting the video together, using the microwave, playing computer games that have a time element. Bus and train timetables are good for this, but keep it simple - even adults struggle to read them at times.
Measure up!
Measuring is a valuable skill. Start by:
- Comparing the lengths of hands, feet, pencils and books
- Ask him how far he can throw a ball - then check
- Compare the mass (we normally say 'weight') of shoes, foodstuffs and pencil cases
- Try comparing a bag of cotton wool with a bag of sugar. Encourage him to estimate a measure first, then check. Remember to use metric measures
- Ask him to find out how long the fences of your garden are (the total length of the outside is the perimeter). How many square metres would fit inside (area)?
- Cooking is brilliant for weighing skills, and remember to use the right jug to measure the volume of liquids, too
- Keep a record of his height and weight (maybe every birthday, or half year) - you can use this data to make a growth chart
Where are we going?
Work on direction and angles by playing at being robots, following instructions to go forward, back and by how much. Then you can talk about half turns and quarter turns, and link all this to the points of the compass. Games such as 'Battleships' are great for building understanding of grid references (remember the rule is 'along the corridor, up the stairs' to be sure which number refers to which line, or axis). These grid references are used later on in more complex games such as chess.
Learning activities
Check out our Activity and resource finder where you'll find tailored learning activities to develop your child's skills in English, maths and science.
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