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Ways to Help Your Child with Math:
Attitude Counts:
How do you feel about math? Your feelings will have an impact on how your children think about math and themselves as mathematicians. Take a few minutes to answer these questions:
Do you think everyone can learn math?
Do you think of math as useful in everyday life?
Do you believe that most jobs today require math skills?
If you answer "yes" to most of these questions, then you are probably encouraging your child to think mathematically. Positive attitudes about math are important for your child's success.
Math at Home:
*Use money to help your child recognize coins, know the value of coins, count coins, make change, find coins that make 25 cents, participate in grocery shopping, and to decide how much they can buy with their allowance.
*Involve counting and numbers in everyday activities. Count parts of the body, count things around the house, count past 10, identify numbers on the elevator, identify numbers on street signs, encourage then to count by 2’s, 5’s, 10’s, to count past 100, look for patterns, practice skip counting by 3’s, 4’s, count past 1000 by starting at 650, 750...1050 etc.
*Help your child start to memorize single digit addition and subtraction problems starting with the doubles: 1+1, 2+2, 3+3, 5-5, 4-4, 3-3. By the end of the 2nd grade your child should know addition and subtraction facts to 20 (1+19, 2+18, 10+10 etc.) Your child should also know addition pairs that equal 10 (1+9, 2+8, 3+7, 4+6, and 5+5) By the end of 5th grade your child should know multiplication and division facts to 12 x 12.
*These are some of the time concepts that your can help your child learn at home: days of the week, months of the year, seasons, minutes in an hour, hours in a day, how to read a standard and analog clock, and how to schedule time (if you need to do 4 things, how much time will it take you)
*Involve your child in activities that encourage measurement like: cooking (fractions, volume, cups, teaspoons, etc., following step-by-step instructions) reading a thermometer (measuring body temperature and measuring temperature outside)