Some children excel in math, and find it to be a fun game to play with. Other children struggle to gain number sense and have great difficulty connecting the math on their paper to a real world application of it. Here are some activities that can help struggling learners to understand certain math skills a little better.
Each family is unique, but all of them share a few things in common. Everyone has to go grocery shopping. Each family has to eat dinner every night, (hopefully together). Eventually, everyone has to take the time to get the laundry done. These are just a few “real world” activities that can be used to help a child to better understand certain math skills.
Use your grocery coupons to create a math game. Before you head to the store, have you child get a pencil and a notebook. Select a few coupons to play with. The number of coupons depends on how difficult a challenge your child requires.
Have your child write down the name of the product. Leave the next line blank. On the third line, write a subtraction sign, and write the amount that the coupon will save you. Put a line under this math problem, and leave the next line blank so the answer can be entered into it. As you shop, have your child write down the amount of money that the product sells for without the coupon. When you get home, your child can work the problems, and learn how much you saved today.
Are you having pizza for dinner? This leads to a natural discussion about fractions. How many pieces is this pizza cut into? Ask your child how many pieces he or she wants to eat. What fraction would that be? Visual learners, who struggle with fractions, might remember the pizza analogy. You can also do this lesson with candy bars that can be easily broken into pieces of the same size.
The task of doing the laundry can also be turned into a real world application for math skills. This works best if you happen to be going to the laundromat to do your laundry. What does it cost to do one load of laundry? How many quarters will that require? What if the machine took dimes, instead? Have your child figure out how many nickels the cost would translate into.
You can also take it one step farther, and have your child keep track of several loads of laundry. Write down the cost to do one load of laundry, and the cost of running that load through a dryer. They are not always the same amount. Your child needs to keep track of how many loads went into a washing machine, and how many loads you paid for to make everything dry. You can turn this into a lesson on addition, or multiplication. It also makes for a good example of the value of a dollar.
Image by rob_rob2001 on Flickr