How do I motivate my child to do maths at home? ( When I don't even like maths myself)

Try these ideas- Regardless of how confident you feel about maths, you CAN really improve your child's motivation.


two spinners and a subtraction worksheet, which would you want to use?

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!


10 best tips to encourage your child to happily do maths at home.


☺If you hated maths at school do your best to keep this a secret!
☺Encourage playful exploration of counting, addition, division…. without them even realising that these skills are being practised by handling real objects.
☺Play maths games. Try these ideas for a game to cover every bit of early school maths.
Play maths games with prizes, a raisin/savoury hoop/chocolate button it doesn’t have to be big (and you can count them too).
☺Try a reward chart- Learn more about how spotting Harley can help with motivation
☺Find maths outside, the beautiful maths of nature and brilliant active games.
☺. Chat about maths with the help of a photo
☺If you have some maths to work out, share your puzzling with your child.
☺Avoid maths workbooks with pages of sums.
☺Avoid apps that are a series of maths tests of sums.

Why doing maths differently at home CAN really change your child's motivation towards learning maths.


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

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