How to help your kids learn math: 4 key ideas

With the emergence of virtual education, many parents have had to help their children learn concepts that, due to not having a face-to-face teacher, they did not quite understand the everything.

Although the contents of primary and the first years of secondary school are relatively simple, those of the subject of mathematics are among the most complicated to teach, especially if we take into account that many adults have completely forgotten the formulas that they now have to learn to their children.

Here we are going to see some guidelines to understand how to help your children learn mathematics, especially avoiding that our offspring get a certain fear and even disgust having to study them.

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How to help your son or daughter to study and learn mathematics?

All parents want their children to learn and to be smarter and smarter than themselves. Each family wants the next generation to surpass it both in opportunities and in knowledge, and for this reason they trust that the school, as a source of learning that is, gives them everything they need to know so they can grow up healthy and end up being autonomous and functional individuals when the time comes. adulthood.

However, as a result of the pandemic, especially during the months of confinement, many parents have had to include some of the tasks that their children's teachers did in their day-to-day lives. Although the classes went from face-to-face to virtual, primary and secondary education have many content that can only be clearly understood if someone explains it face-to-face, without devices at all. half.

For this reason, many parents have been forced to explain to their children the class content, more or less defending himself trying to remember some knowledge that they left behind so many years. All the subjects have contents that are difficult to remember, but one of the most resistant to parents of children of all ages is mathematics. The problem is not only remembering how certain operations were done, but it is also difficult to explain them.

Fortunately for many parents who today continue to struggle with the subject of numbers, formulas and calculations, here are some tips to help your children learn the math.

1. Learn together

As we said, many are the parents who have trouble remembering mathematics. This is one of the subjects that we had the most crossed, even when we reached adulthood, at which time we did not few are those who either forget what they once came to understand or, directly, it is that they did not learn it.

However, now that we have to explain it to our offspring we are forced to learn it yes or yes. As parents we must see ourselves as companions on the path of knowledge of our children more than their guides, and the Mathematics is a good example of this because while we try to explain it to our offspring we are learning it again.

A very good tactic for our children to learn quickly and have fun along the way is pretend that we are both learning it, something that is not really far from reality. It is true that as parents we have the natural desire to provide help to our children with our experience, but this is impossible if we do not master what we have to explain.

It is better to accept that there are things that we still have to learn or, at least, review them. If you are dealing with something that is not mastered, you should be honest with your child and tell him that this method or exercise is new for us, but that we can work together to understand and learn it.

2. Start with the simplest

Learning something new, especially a mathematical concept, can be overwhelming. Given the complexity with which many students and parents view mathematics, the appropriate thing is to start with the simplest, going little by little making sure that we understand everything that we are consulting. At first it pays to be conservative and not assume that our son or daughter has mastered concepts from previous lessons.

Depending on the age of our son, we can check if she is really understanding him in an entertaining, calm and educational way. Especially if they are small children, it is essential to use physical objects, such as toy pieces, buttons, coins or anything else to see if he is understanding processes like adding, subtracting, dividing, pairs, multiples of a number ...

Many children view math as quite abstract and are scared of it. In these cases, to prevent this fear from escalating, it is better not to make them answer an exercise to show that they know it or ask them out loud if they know how to do what is asked of them.

If the child shows signs that he likes mathematics, perhaps he will be happy to do all this, but in case of If this is not the case, the only thing that we will achieve is that it becomes more scary if we ask it in such invasive. Every father and mother should know the strengths and weaknesses of their son or daughter and, if mathematics is one of them, teach it in the least distressing way possible.

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3. Make them useful

Everything that is taught in school will one day end up being useful, to a greater or lesser extent. Although mathematics is the one that we can get the most daily use of, there are not a few children who continue to see it very abstract, so much so that they wonder what it is going to do for them, especially considering that there are calculators.

Obviously there are certain mathematical calculations that if learned to do mentally are a skill interesting but not something that can be found of daily use, unless you are a mathematician of profession. For example, knowing how to divide 354,345 by 21,987 without having to write it down on paper is something that is not going to be very common in our daily lives.

But This does not mean that throughout our lives we do not have to do any mental calculations. There are many everyday situations in which we will have to calculate quickly to be able to get out of trouble, such as It could be to be in the supermarket with a budget of € 40 and see what we can buy to eat this week.

The best way to teach math is to make it useful. One of the currents of his teaching today is to turn apprentices into "solvers problems ”, making them skilled when it comes to reasoning and applying what they have learned in their lives daily.

We can see if they have internalized the concepts doing everyday tasks such as eating, cleaning or shopping authentic mathematical exercises. For example, we can ask them to calculate how much rice we will need for 6 people if we know that one you need 50 grams, or ask them how many eighths are in a quarter of a pizza and other exercises like that.

4. Avoid generating fear

There are many parents who confess to their children that mathematics has never been good for them. This, which can be seen as an innocent confession, is very detrimental in learning mathematics and make something that in itself does not have to be difficult to learn become a real odyssey for the small.

The real problem is not that there is some kind of malignant gene that makes the whole family bad at math, but that a culture of fear towards mathematics has been generated. As they have a bad reputation in the family, the little ones grow up in an environment in which mathematics is even seen as a phobic object.

This is very easily reflected when teaching mathematics. If mom or dad have had bad experiences with math, they are likely to even panic when they try to explain it to their children. Teaching mathematical concepts that are not mastered can generate what is colloquially called math anxiety, the irrational fear of any mathematical aspect.

The risk of this fear is that fear can be passed on to your child and have consequences on their academic performanceIn addition to making him fear mathematics so much that he really has a very bad time in the subject. It can even influence your decisions in life such as deciding not to study what you would like to do for the simple fact that you have a subject with numbers.

A fairly simple trick is to avoid thinking that we are actually doing math, we are simply teaching our son or daughter to learn useful tools for life. We can even give it a more friendly name, such as "problem solving" or "calculation tools", anything that serves to reflect the skills to be learned.