Maths at Home

Just like reading, there are many things you can do at home to support your child’s maths development. The more children can see maths applied at home, the more they understand the relevance for maths in their lives.

• Cooking is a great way to get children interacting with fractions using different sized ‘cups’, measuring using millilitres, measuring using grams, measuring time duration for cooking etc.
• Cooking offers great opportunities for problem solving e.g the recipe says we need half a cup of flour but I only have a quarter cup, could I still measure out half a cup somehow? Or, I need 500 ml of water but I can only see 1L marked on my measuring jug? How can I still use the jug? Or, if it is 2:30pm and we need to bake the cake for 45 minutes, what time will it be ready?
• Working in the yard can also provide opportunities for maths thinking e.g we need to turf down the side of the house which is 21 metres long and 4 metres wide, how much turf will we need? Or, we have 2 planter boxes we want to fill with soil to make vege gardens with the dimensions of length:2m, height: 1m and width: 1 m, how many cubic m of soil do we need?
• Playing certain games is another way to bring maths into the home. Yahtzee is brilliant for number facts (addition facts for the younger children, multiplication facts for the older children), uno for our little learners, learning their number symbols and colours, monopoly for calculating money amounts (I cannot be held responsible for any family blow-ups playing these games however ?).

One thing I have often heard over the years is parents saying ‘I was never very good at maths so I know why my child doesn’t get it’. This can often set a really fixed mindset in our children when they hear us saying that. It leads them to believe that if they don’t get it at the start, they will never get it. We encourage a growth mindset at Dayboro which is believing we can get better over time with persistence, teaching, practise and focus. New neurons can be formed at any time if the learning environment is right. It is really important that children know just because maths might take them longer or just because they might not get it straight away, does not mean it will be difficult forever. They need to seek extra help, keep trying, be open to understanding the mistakes and learning from them and they will make progress.

Any questions, please feel free to e-mail me: dmath9@eq.edu.au

Dee Mathiesen

Head of Curriculum