Today is financial awareness day! It’s never too early to start talking about money math with kids. The more comfortable they feel with the subject better! Financial conversations can start early and be fun and relevant by making it about things kids understand — like crayons!

When you come into our math tutoring learning center we make sure to meet kids where they are in their math learning journey. Today we offer a word problem challenge that can help kids of any age and grade level practice their money math, addition, subtraction, and multiplication.

Open the box and color yourself surprised at how much fun math can be! 

Everybody loves earning prizes and rewards, it helps kids especially to recognize the value of hard work in the short term when the actual benefits may not be clear until days or months later. When students come into Mathnasium for tutoring for math they earn opportunities to choose prizes from the rewards cabinet. The kids love it, but parents know that the real prize is their child’s newfound confidence in math.

Whether they’re enrolled at our math learning center or not, all kids can use this week’s word problem challenge to practice important math skills such as fractions and percents, multiplication and division, addition and subtraction. Go ahead and take a look at the question below to get started.

Question: A clown makes 10 balloon giraffes, 16 balloon poodles, 5 balloon monkeys, and a balloon octopus. How many balloon animals does the clown make?

We know you can do it! When you're ready, look below to check your solution against ours.

Solution: Let’s add the animals together, one species at a time. There are 10 giraffes and 16 poodles, and 10 + 16 = 26. To add the 5 monkeys, we can count 4 up to 30 and 1 more up to 31. One more animal—the octopus—makes 32!