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While maths comes naturally to lots of children, others find it more of a challenge and require a little extra support at home. If the latter sounds like your child, don’t panic, as there are lots of simple ways to help them with the comprehension of basic equations; you don’t necessarily have to be a maths genius yourself. Here are some top tips from a private school in London.
If your child is young, nursery rhymes are a great way to help them with their counting. Ten Green Bottles is just one example, but you should be able to find plenty more that you can sing along to on YouTube. When playing with their toys, encourage them to count how many puzzle pieces there are or how many barbies they have, to familiarise them with numbers.
Older children will obviously require a little more of a challenge. Lots of board games, like Snakes & Ladders or Monopoly, involve counting and basic sums. There are also lots of interactive games online, as well as downloadable apps, that you could encourage your child to play so that they start to enjoy maths, rather than find it boring or too tricky.
Next time you go shopping, take your child along and ask them to figure out how much everything will cost when you get to the till, and how much change you’ll require if you pay with cash. You could also encourage your child to help you with the cooking, as this involves measuring ingredients and determining oven times and temperatures. When cooking with your child, ask them if they know how to convert from grams to ounces, and other challenges to get them thinking. Essentially, try and demonstrate to your child how important maths is in everyday life, so that it seems less intimidating to them.
If you are truly concerned about your child’s performance in their maths lessons, it might be worth looking into hiring a private tutor. If this is not really an option, you could also try contacting their maths teacher and asking for some age-appropriate learning resources that they can work through during their own time.
This is a collaborative post.
Welcome to Birds and Lilies! I'm Lou: mother, blogger and freelance writer. This is my lifestyle blog, where I talk about motherhood, infertility and IVF, beauty, my love for food and wine, as well as my thoughts about stuff, and our real-life and travel adventures.
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