To teach your child math, you don’t need special knowledge of the subject. Just read these valuable tips to get ideas and start teaching them. What is the essential ingredient when successfully teaching your child mathematics? Special knowledge of the subject? An advanced
To teach your child math, you don’t need special knowledge of the subject. Just read these valuable tips to get ideas and start teaching them. What is the essential ingredient when successfully teaching your child mathematics? Special knowledge of the subject? An advanced degree? Tremendous facility in mathematical calculations? Not really any of the above. In fact, parents are often far better teachers for their young children than someone else with great knowledge of math. WHY, you might ask. Because parents are more likely to start from the beginning. They teach one step at a time. They keep it simple and clear and in turn, which builds true understanding in their children. They also teach with such joy that no wonder their little students learn everything so quickly. Teaching with joy is the most essential ingredient in all of teaching. [tweet_quote]Parents are almost always much better mathematicians than they give themselves credit for.[/tweet_quote] No adult can go through the day without thinking and reasoning mathematically. In order to plan and organize for the daily lives of their children, parents calculate time, money, distance, weight, and measurement. More so, by doing such calculations out loud, many parents have, in fact, created fine young mathematicians because they have actively engaged their child in mathematical conversations throughout the day. [tweet_quote]Speaking the language of mathematics fluently accomplishes a great deal for your child.[/tweet_quote] In this way, you have taught them mathematical Bits of Intelligence, Dots, without even realizing. Mathematics is, thus, not confined to a few daily sessions of presenting arithmetic on cards but becomes a living language, vital to the exciting activities of the day. When you speak a language regularly and conversationally, your child will have the opportunity to do so, too. The Dots are simply the basic facts or words of the language of mathematics. The more these words are spoken, the more meaningful and useful they become.
Read these valuable tips to get ideas on how you can teach your child math:
1. Writing down a language you are teaching is extremely helpful for both parent(s) and child. It is far easier to be consistent in teaching when the information is written in a form that can be repeated precisely, easily and often. For example, daily schedules listing time and events, records of time and distance in physical activities, recipes, household budget facts, and detailed weather reports provide your child with a fine mathematical environment when written in large print and posted throughout the house. 2. Sharing your wealth of practical mathematical knowledge can be accomplished efficiently by planning to teach one area at a time. Let’s take distance as an example. You might begin by measuring prominent household objects, hallways, doorways, windows and rooms and then speaking of them, precisely and often. Replace “Let’s crawl for a little while“ with “Let’s crawl one hundred feet””that’s two times around the living room.” The topic of distance ranges, of course, from a millimeter (the head of a pin) to thousands of miles and everything in between. That’s a lot of mathematics to learn and enjoy together, don’t you think? You never need to run out of ideas in using the language of mathematics as there are so many readily available sources at your disposal: 3. The daily newspaper is a good example. Open it up to virtually any page and focus on numbers in advertisements, the weather reports, sports page statistics, stocks and bonds or the price of gold and silver. Depending on your child’s interest, each could become a short or long term project of study in math. 4. Even the telephone directory is a helpful source as the first section lists domestic and international time zones quite clearly. Using the simple guidelines of Eastern Standard Time, Central Time, Rocky Mountain Time, etc., your child can easily learn to compute that when it is noon (lunch time) in Philadelphia, it’s nine o’clock in the morning (breakfast time) in Los Angeles. 5. You can also use a world map and teach your child to compute world times. By using a world map marked with time zones, you can teach that at eight o’clock at night (bedtime) in Philadelphia, it’s ten o’clock the next morning in Tokyo, and the children are in school. 6. Dictionaries and encyclopedias provide a wealth of interesting math facts to be taught and compared. For example, the cheetah runs 60 miles per hour; the elephant can run 30 miles per hour, half that speed. Rembrandt was born in the year 1606 and lived 63 years; Picasso was born 212 years later. The heart beats around 70 times per minute, 100,000 times per day. The Statue of Liberty is 150 feet high; the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France is 984 feet tall. This type of information can form an interesting story or problem each day. For example, if we wanted to climb Mt. Everest in five days, how many miles must we climb each day to reach the top? 7. The language of mathematics is virtually as wide and end