How To Help Your Children Learn Mathematics: 4 Key Ideas
With the emergence of virtual education, many parents have had to help their children learn concepts that, due to not having an in-person teacher, they did not fully understand.
Although the contents of primary school 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 It’s up to your children to learn.
Here we are going to see some guidelines to understand how to help your children learn mathematics especially preventing our offspring from becoming afraid and even disgusted by having to study them.
How to help your son or daughter study and learn mathematics?
All parents want their children to learn and to be smarter and more intelligent than themselves. Each family wants the next generation to surpass them in both opportunities and knowledge, and that is why they trust that the school, as a source of learning, provides them with everything they need to know so that they can grow up healthy and end up being autonomous and independent individuals. functional when adulthood arrives.
However, as a result of the pandemic, especially during the months of confinement, many parents have had to include in their daily lives some of the tasks that their children’s teachers did. Although classes went from in-person to virtual, primary and secondary education has many contents that can only be clearly understood if someone explains them face to face, without devices in the way.
For this reason, many parents have found themselves forced to have to explain class content to their children, more or less defending themselves by trying to remember knowledge they left behind so many years ago. All subjects have content that is a little difficult to remember, but one of the most difficult for 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 we present a series of tips that will help your children learn mathematics.
As we said, many parents have problems remembering mathematics. This is one of the subjects that we had the most, even when we reach adulthood, a moment in which there are many who either forget what they once understood or, directly, they did not even manage to learn it.
However, now that we have to explain it to our children, we are forced to learn it no matter what. As parents we must see ourselves as companions on our children’s path of knowledge more than their guides, and mathematics is a good example of this because while we try to explain it to our children we learn it again.
A very good tactic for our children to learn quickly and have a good time along the way is pretend that we are both learning it, something that in reality is not 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 we still have to learn or, at least, review them. If we are faced with something that we have not mastered, we should be honest with our 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 very overwhelming. Given the complexity with which many students and parents view mathematics, The best thing to do is to start with the simplest things, going little by little, making sure that we understand everything we are talking about At first it is worth being conservative and not assuming that our son or daughter has mastered concepts from previous lessons.
Depending on the age of our child, we can check if they are really understanding it in an entertaining, calm and educational way. Especially when it comes to small children, it is essential to use physical objects, such as toy pieces, buttons, coins or anything else to see if you are understanding processes such as adding, subtracting, dividing, pairs, multiples of a number…
Many children see mathematics as something quite abstract and it scares them. 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 if not, the only thing we will achieve is that he will be more afraid if we ask him in such an invasive way. 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.
3. Make them useful
Everything that is taught in school will end up being useful one day, to a greater or lesser extent. Although mathematics is the one that we can get the most daily use from, there are many children who continue to see it as very abstract, so much so that they wonder what it will be used for, especially considering that calculators exist.
Obviously there are certain mathematical calculations that if you learn to do mentally are an interesting skill but not something that you can find daily use in, unless you are a mathematician by 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 by, such as being in the supermarket with a budget of €40 and seeing what we can buy to be able to eat this week.
The best way to teach mathematics is to make it useful. One of the current teaching trends is to turn learners into “problem solvers”, making them skilled at reasoning and applying what they have learned in their daily lives.
We can see if they have internalized the concepts by turning everyday tasks such as eating, cleaning or shopping into 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 needs 50 grams, or ask them how many eighths there are in a quarter of a pizza and other similar exercises.
There are many parents who confess to their children that they have never been good at mathematics. This, which can be seen as an innocent confession, is very harmful in learning mathematics and makes something that in itself does not have to be difficult to learn become a real odyssey for the child.
The real problem is not that there is some kind of evil gene that makes the whole family bad at math, but that a culture of fear towards mathematics has been generated Since 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 mathematics, it is very likely that they will 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 transferred to your child and have consequences on their academic performance, in addition to making him fear mathematics so much that he really has a very bad time in the subject. He can even influence his decisions in life, such as deciding not to study what he would like to do for the simple fact that he has a subject with numbers.
A fairly simple trick is to avoid thinking that we are actually doing mathematics, we are simply teaching our son or daughter to learn useful tools for life. We can even give it a friendlier name, such as “problem solving” or “calculation tools”, anything that serves to reflect the skills that are going to be learned.
