On average, students lose approximately 2.6 months of math learning over the summer. Here are some great ways to keep math learning alive through the summer and help build your child’s confidence for their return to school in the fall.
Have your kids help plan your vacation. Kids learn critical thinking, problem-solving, and all types of math when they help with travel plans. You can have them help make a budget, decide on a timeline of activities, calculate how much gas you’ll need, and figure out how long it will take to arrive at a certain destination. Even planning a day trip to an amusement park, local festival or the beach can offer a great math opportunity!
Buy groceries. Include your children in your next grocery shopping trip to buy the items needed to cook dinner or bake a special dessert. Before leaving, they can help make an ingredient list and set a budget. Once at the store, they’ll have to make decisions to help them stay within the budget, using a variety of math skills.
Cook dinner or a special summer dessert. Following a recipe teaches children the importance of measuring, following sequences and counting - great for children eight and under. Have older children figure out how to double or triple a recipe so you can have leftovers or so they can invite all their neighbourhood friends over for a treat!
Play a board or card game. So many games require different math skills. You can have your kids keep score, add up a dice roll or notice patterns. There are tons of great card games that work for kids of all ages. Monopoly, Yahtzee, Connect 4, and Rummikub are also all great options.
Plant a garden. It doesn’t have to be a huge garden - a few tomato plants or some berries or bean stalks or your favourite flowers are enough. Children can count how many seeds they plant and how many plants grow. They can track their measurement every couple of days. You can have children estimate how many fruits or flowers there will be during one picking and then have them count them to see how close they were. Let them use their harvest to cook or bake with for extra learning (see idea #2 above!).
Have them calculate the tip. If you’re out for dinner, have your kids review the bill and practice using percentages to calculate an appropriate tip for the server. Using math in everyday scenarios like this help kids understand the practical applications of math in our daily lives.
Find Math. Encourage your child to find four connections one of their favourite topics has to math. If they love baseball, you could review batting averages, the speed of a curveball etc. If they love gaming, you could look at average scores, programming and coding etc. The more often your child connects math to the world around them, the more it makes sense!
Summer learning. Of course, we’re biased, but Mathnasium summer programs are one of the best ways to prevent summer learning loss and build confidence for the upcoming school year. Plus, Mathnasium instructors know how to make math learning fun, so your kids will enjoy themselves while keeping up their math learning.
We hope this list is just a starting point for how you can incorporate math learning into your summer adventures over the next couple of months. If you think Mathnasium might be right for your child, book a trial soon!
