CUDDLE UP AND LEARN MATH
Helping your children learn basic math is easier than most people think, say professors Ian VanderBurgh and Mary Reid. “The No.1 wars that occur at the kitchen table for homework is math,” said Reid. “All parents remember a major fight that broke out about math homework.” But learning doesn’t have to be a battle of wills or even done at a desk. Math is part of everyday life so there are lessons all around us from cooking to shopping to taking a walk.
Here are some of their suggestions:
1. Have kids join you in the kitchen. If you need one cup of flour, get out the ¼ cup instead and figure out together how many times you need to fill it to get to the amount you need. If you are making three school lunches and you have one apple on the counter, ask the kids how many more apples you need. Preparing meals provides endless opportunities to have fun with math.
2. Go shopping together. Discuss how much peanut butter costs compared to jam. Figure out together which apples are the best buy. If you have five people coming over for dinner and two cupcakes at home, how many more do you need to have enough for dessert? Count how many different kinds of pears the store sells.
3. Take a walk. Math is about more than numbers. It’s also about patterns and problem-solving. Does every third house have the same colour of bricks? What is our best route to the park? How many minutes does it take us to get there? What shape is a stop sign? If we live six streets from the park and we’ve walked three, how many more is there to go?
4. Set the table together. We have four chairs at our table and six people coming for dinner. How many chairs do we need to add? What shape is the dinner plate? Oops, I brought 10 cups to the table, how many do I need to put back? Are there going to be more adults at the table or kids at the table?
5. Read music together. Music is full of patterns and fractions.
6. Plan a family game night. A lot of popular games such as Snakes and Ladders, Yahtzee and Monopoly involve math.
7. Add math the next time you cuddle up
and read. This book has 15 pages and we’ve read six, how many more to go? We have three books and we’ve read two of them, how many left before bedtime? Are there patterns in the book — such as that dog shows up on every other page? How many different kinds of trucks are in this book? How many things are shaped like a square on this page?