If you’re having difficulty getting your child to do maths homework, don’t beat yourself up, we have a whole culture to change here!
Your child’s day at home will involve reading, writing and talking without them even realising that they are developing these skills. If we can encourage a little bit of maths magic to happen too that will be infinitely more motivational and valuable in terms of learning than trying to get them to complete a maths worksheet of sums or engage with an app that is basically a series of tests.
With something to see and reach out for, a tiny baby does maths and they keep on working on it until they’ve mastered it. We call it play but it’s the most important learning, laying down connections in the brain that will enable all future learning. When your four year old.. eight year old… has something to see and handle, maths at home can be real, maths at home can be playful, maths at home can be a very powerful foundation. Most importantly, in terms of motivation, it will be FUN.
Whether it’s counting, subtraction, decimals, fractions...finding something for your child to see and handle is just brilliant. Making this playful and creative- into a GAME is a really powerful learning opportunity. Games are a brilliant way to change your child's reaction to maths from fear or boredom to excitement and curiosity and when this is acheived there will be no problems motivating your child to do maths at home. Read more about the power of maths games.
Sharing a photo of something real comes in as the next best thing and helps your child move towards the final goal of working with abstract maths. Try talking about these photos
For even more maths motivation pose your child the challenge of taking a photo to show for example 3x3.Stepping into the outside environment with the beautiful maths of nature and the possibilities of active games you have a great source of size, pattern and shape and endless possibilities to explore number, counting and estimating- and it’s calming too. A calm happy child has a brain hard wired for fantastic problem solving - fantastic maths learning
Rewards and reward charts can be a powerful motivational tool too. Download a Harley chart to use with the Number Chase games