Simple Ways to Teach your Child Math at Home During the Pandemic
The global pandemic has taken a toll on parents and children alike. The prolonged closure of school has affected learning and caused anxiety in parents and disrupted school-going children’s lives. If you are a parent, you must be struggling with many things due to the lockdown, including teaching your child. Math is perhaps the most challenging subject to teach your child.
The best way to go about it is to find online math tutors to teach your child. However, if you cannot do so for one reason or another, you can use these simple and fun techniques to teach your child math at home.
1. Make use of the internet
There are several websites online that are useful for learning math. Some are as simple as using pattern blocks in different colors to learn fractions, while others teach solving complex mathematical problems. Depending on the age and educational level of a child, find a website that offers math quizzes that suit them.
2. Hire an Online Math Tutor
Since it’s pandemic, it is not safe to ask your kid to join a physical academy or request a math expert to visit your home for tuition. In that case, the best option is to find good online math tutors, and let them cater to all your child’s math problems.
An online tutor helps set a fixed study schedule, as flexibility is one of the best characteristics of online tutoring.
Additionally, a tutor ensures that your child understands all the basic and complex formulas and aspects of this subject, under your safe roof.
Simply put, this facility supports your kids in meeting their academic goals, without them contracting the ugly virus.
3. Math cooking and baking
Learning math while baking or cooking is the perfect definition of killing two birds with one stone. It can be an excellent tool for teaching fractions to young children by measuring the quantity of ingredients. If you have older children, you can teach them ratios and ask them questions to see if they are learning from mathematical concepts. For example, if one rice cup can feed two people, how many rice cups should you cook for ten people? It could be a simple question but a great way to learn multiplication.
4. Buy math storybooks for your child
Reading math-themed stories to your children is another great way for them to learn math. An excellent example of such a book is Number Devil which has interesting mathematics problems that you could solve with your child. You can also start stories that will solve mathematical problems, especially for children who find math boring.
5. Play some games
Many games apply mathematical concepts. Board games like Math In Space and Monopoly have a lot of math in them. There are also balloons and dice that teach kids addition. For older children, they will understand probability, which is another essential math concept.
6. Reward your child
Money is motivation to all of us. You can have your child maintain a piggy bank where they put real or fake money and count how much they have each time they make a new “deposit”. In time you can introduce conversions and ratios and expand their math knowledge. It is also a great way to teach financial literacy to your child.
If you want to learn more, read this guide about financial education that covers a variety of financial topics that teenagers need to understand to get the most out of life.
As a parent, you should always remember that math is all around us. It is in your cooking, work, sports activities and many aspects of your life. Your child might not enjoy math that much, but simple exercises at home could make the entire difference between your child struggling with math to enjoying it. It is also a fantastic way to ensure that your child uses their time constructively during the pandemic, now that there is too much free time for kids.
