When Lance Kay, of Lafayette, PA (on left), was a pre-K student in his Montessori school, his teachers noticed something unusual. Despite being only five years old, he was successfully answering multiplication and division problems, such as, “If you have five safety pins and each has three beads on it, how many beads do you have?” (15). They alerted his mother, Heather Kay, to his budding math skills.

Everyday math challenges are as easy as pie when you practice a little bit every day!

When is your child better at math—at the end of a grade level or at the beginning of the next grade?   

If you answered, “end of a grade level,” you’re usually right. The typical child has more math skills when they leave second grade than when they enter third grade. That’s because, during the summer, the majority of students lose the equivalent of two months of math skills.