Inside Ivanhoe

IPS Tips 

F - Year 2 (approximately)- DOING MATHS TOGETHER AT HOME.

A child’s first years are a time of rapid learning. Research tells us that babies have an innate capacity to understand numbers. As your child’s first teacher, you play a key role in developing their numeracy skills from an early age.

 

Developing numeracy skills early gives children an important foundation for their learning and development. It helps prepare them for daily life, including general problem solving and handling money.

 

Maths includes noticing numbers, shapes, patterns, size, time and measurement. Incorporating maths into everyday experiences is easy and fun. Maths is everywhere – in the playground, at the shops and at home.

 

Children need lots of experiences in making, counting, drawing and talking about numbers. The activities in this section will help your child to develop these skills. You may feel the maths your child is doing at school is different from how you were taught, but you can still support your child in many ways. Make connections for your child by explaining how numbers and counting are a part of everyday life.

Playing shop

Playing shop helps ground your child’s maths learning in the real world while also developing their social skills. One way to play shop is to create a mini-shop at home. Here are a few tips and activities:

  • Collect food and grocery items and label them with prices written on sticky notes, or prices cut out of shopping catalogues.
  • Talk about how we pay for items using coins, notes and cards.
  • Make paper money or use play money to buy and sell goods from the mini-shop.
  • Collect old receipts or price tags and use them in the mini- shop.
  • Notice the features of different coins, including their shapes and the animals and people shown. Discuss the differences. Create coin rubbings with pencils and paper.
  • Encourage your child to order food items by height (tallest to the shortest) or by cost (least expensive to most expensive).
  • Introduce kitchen scales to the mini-shop to weigh foods, such as a box of tea bags or a bag of rice, and order items by weight.

Year 3 - 6 (approximately)- EXPLORING NUMERACY WITH YOUR CHILD.

Family participation in learning is one of the most accurate predictors of a child’s success in school and beyond.

 

Providing opportunities to discuss and engage in mathematics supports your child’s learning in and out of school. Your child will also begin to connect the importance of maths with their everyday activities, such as navigating public transport, comparing and choosing the best item to buy in stores, setting a budget, and cooking.

 

Talk positively about maths so your child also values it. If your experiences in maths at school were less than ideal, avoid making comments like “I was bad at maths at school,” or “I didn’t like maths because it was too hard.” Comments like these can lower your child’s expectations of themselves, and can perpetuate myths about people being naturally bad or good at maths.

 

Conversely, if you did well at maths in school, avoid jumping in with answers or solutions. Encourage your child to talk about how they might work out maths problems. This helps boost their confidence and deepens their understanding.

 

Regardless of your own school experiences in maths, be reassured that maths today is not about learning by rote. Today, the focus is on recognising that there are multiple ways to get an answer, and being able to explain how and why you chose the approach you did.

 

There are many activities you can do at home to help explore maths with your child. When participating in these activities, avoid associating them with speed. Expecting your child to work quickly on maths can cause maths anxiety. 

 

Try to focus on the process and not the outcome.

Travel timetables

Here are some questions to ask your child that improve their knowledge of time and their problem solving skills:

  • Can you identify your starting point on the timetable?
  • What is the earliest and latest time to travel on this route?
  • How long does it take to travel the entire route?
  • How many stops are there on this route?
  • What is the difference in the time travelled when not making all the stops?
  • What is the cost? Is it good value compared to other travel options?
  • Which is the best route to travel? Why do you think this?
  • To get to training on time, when will you need to leave?