Maths Top Tips

Tips to Support Your Child with Maths

There are lots of things you can do to support your child at home! The most important thing to remember is that maths should be fun—we want children to enjoy what they are learning and feel confident in their own abilities. This will help them to be willing to “have a go”, even if they are not sure of something.

Maths is all around you and can do done little and often:

• Discuss the shapes that you can see around the house or on a walk, talk about the properties that make them special.
• Read the numbers that you see on signs—really good on a long drive on the motorway!
• When shopping, ask children to work out the totals or the change you might get. Discuss what the cost would be if I had 2, 3 or 4 of something. They could also estimate the cost with a larger shop!
• If cooking, ask the children to measure out the ingredients. Talk about the units they are using (eg: grams for weight; millilitres for liquids) This also involves reading numbers!
• Go out on a walk—count the number of cars or animals you see. You could make a graph of the data, ask questions about it, sort them in different ways.

It is also important that you do lots of work with numbers. Children need to have a secure understanding of numbers to achieve their best. These are just some ideas you could use to make the work fun and interesting:

• Ordering number cards on a washing line
• Encouraging children to use their number bonds to find change from 10p, 20p, 50p and £1
• Painting times tables arrays/patterns
• Matching pairs games (this could be times tables, number bonds, matching pictures to numbers or even shapes)
• Beat the calculator or parent—Who can find the answer to the question the quickest?
• Applying doubling and halving skills when cooking and using recipes
• Learning finger games and rhymes for times tables and number bonds