Learning and Teaching
MATHEMATICS AT HOME
On Monday and Tuesday, Monica and I attended the National Catholic Education Conference in Melbourne. This conference brought together school and system leaders, educators, clergy and religious, students, educational professionals, researchers, families and other groups interested in Catholic education to promote examples of best practice and plan future directions to continue the flourishing vibrant and authentically Catholic learning communities across Australia.
I attended a session about Parent Engagement. The research tells us, when families and schools work together, children are more likely to build good relationships and do better at school.
Recently some parents have asked how they can support their child in their learning of Mathematics at home. Remember you don’t have to be an expert. Just doing the simple things at home with your child is what really matters. Supporting and encouraging learning is enough.
Everyday activities help children learn. These are simple activities that can teach them many things about counting, colours, food and measurement, as well as learning help.
Below are some ideas!
- Involve your child in cooking as much as possible- measuring ingredients and measuring cooking times etc.
- Planning their day; a day out or their morning getting ready with a focus on elapsed time and how long it will take to travel to certain places
- Card games or dice games that students play at school- add 10, subtract 10, hit the target, salute, first to 100
- Going food shopping with you and comparing prices, adding and subtracting money, looking for the ‘best buys’
- Multiplication bingo- the product of rolling two dice (can be 6 or 12 sided dice) (a gameboard can be sent home if requested)
- Division Bingo (a gameboard can be sent home if requested)
- Construction at home- measuring using a tape measure/ruler
- Students can play any online interactive mathematics games sent to them in their google drive
- Looking at sporting scores and other statistics
- Creating as many different arrays using a given number or rolling dice or turning over playing cards
- Battleships
- Mathler daily challenge
- When doing the laundry:
- Count the pegs.
- Name the colours of the pegs
- Sort the pegs into colours.
- Find the matching socks
- Name the articles of clothing.
- Sort the clothes into dark and light colours.