Maths at Home

As the new Big Idea comes around and teachers start to plan their new concepts in literacy and numeracy, you may soon get a Learning Itinerary sent home outlining what your child is learning.  

This will outline what students are learning in the classroom, but parents can often wonder what they can do at home to help support their child’s learning. 

In the classroom, teachers will introduce a strategy that they will be teaching, that is then adapted for the enabler and extender. These strategies are adaptive and are applied in many different ways during maths to suit the wide breath of students we see in the classroom. 

However at home, we do want you to foster a love of maths but we don’t expect you to be teaching your child maths strategies (otherwise we’d be out of a job!) 

So what are some ways you can support your child with their learning, without making it feel like they’re at school when they’re at home? 

Love Maths - This is a great website that was developed by a teacher, Michael Minus, who has developed a great resource filled with games for Foundation all the way up to grade 6. Games are a great way to reinforce those maths concepts, without it feeling like you are “teaching” your child. My two favourite things about this website is they have a video to show you how to play (great for visual learners!) and they also have some prompting questions, to have those incidental maths conversations without feeling like you’re interrogating them! 

Place Value Yahtzee  - Yahtzee is a great game to play, and a game you can adapt from Foundation to Grade 6!  It reinforces place value concepts (which are necessary in all areas of maths!) and is really fun. This game starts with 3 digit numbers and goes all the way up to decimal numbers. In the classroom, I’ve used Yahtzee for the Junior years, but I’ve made my own game -> Place value Yahtzee 2- 5 digits

 Offline maths games  One good thing that came out of Covid, was we prepared lots of “offline” maths games for families to play, when you needed a break from the screen. This document has instructions and games from Foundie to Grade 6 that you can play at home. There are some of my personal favourites on there, including WAR and Greedy Pig! 

ADDO - One of my absolute FAVOURITE games to teach is ADDO/SUBO/MULTO/DIVO. This game is like bingo, but it’s a way to practise addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. The rules are in the slide show but essentially: you fill your board with numbers. Then the “caller” pulls out a sum (for example, 4 + 4) if you have the answer on your board (8) you’d cross that off. When you get 3 in a line or your whole board crossed off, you then call out ADDO! You can adapt this game to the four operations and it is really fun.  

Divide and conquer For those in the upper years, a little birdy told me you are looking at division! So here is a card game that can help you practise division without feeling like it! I’ve never played this before, so if you enjoy it, please let me know!  

There are lots of fun maths games out there that help support your child but in a way that doesn’t make them feel like you’re teaching them. A bonus is, games are also great to teach some of those social emotional skills like turn taking, being a good winner and resilience in the face of defeat (or challenge). If you play a game and enjoy it or you know of another website or resource with good home maths games to share, please let me know (you can email me. Happy gaming!