5 Fun Ways To Incorporate Math Into The Holidays

Dec 18, 2020 | Killarney

For most students, math is a lot more fun when they can draw connections to real life situations that demonstrate how math is important to their day to day life. Math is even more fun when they don’t even realize they are learning. Incorporating math into the holidays is a fun and unexpected way to keep your child engaged and working on their math skills during the break.

Bringing math into your holiday celebrations is an excellent opportunity for learning. While there are many ways you can incorporate math skills into your holiday preparations, here are a few ideas to get the ball rolling.

  1. Holiday Shopping 

Shopping for the holidays presents numerous ways to have your child build on their math skills. You can have them create a Christmas wish list, find the price of the items and add up the costs. Not only does this support a variety of math skills including counting, addition and subtraction, it also teaches them the value of a dollar.

Gift buying is also a great way to teach budgeting, calculations, estimating and much more. Determine the budget for certain gifts and allow your child to make selections that will keep them within their budget. It’s a fun way to give some additional responsibility while also using a plethora of math skills.

Purchasing groceries is another way that shopping can demonstrate the need for math in daily life. Buying food includes determining weight, costs, budgeting and much more. The grocery store is one of the single best places to help your child use their math knowledge and cement the concepts they are learning at school.

 

  1. Baking and Cooking

The core of any holiday celebration is food! Baking and cooking together also presents numerous opportunities to teach your children about how they will apply math concepts in their every day. Measuring ingredients, estimating, fractions, metric conversions, division and addition are just some of the math skills needed to baking holiday treats or cook a beautiful meal to enjoy with your family. Get your kids involved in following a recipe, measuring ingredients, determining conversions or reducing and increasing recipe amounts. Not only will they love being a part of the most important preparations, they will also learn a lot and associate math with sweet treats - that’s a win-win situation!

 

  1. Gift Wrapping 

Wrapping Christmas gifts is a great chance to look at concepts like area, measurement and geometry. Grab the paper, scissors and ruler and do some gift wrapping with your kids while sharpening their math skills.

 

  1. Decorating 

Decorating offers the chance to count, discuss shapes, patterns, length, estimation and so much more. Make decorating a game where you can estimate the length needed to wrap around the tree, or identify shapes, create patterns, count ornaments, measure ribbon and determine height and width.

 

  1. Family Game Night 

There’s nothing like a game night to bring your family together over the holidays. It’s also an excellent opportunity to hone important skills for math such as problem solving, counting skills and number sense. Break out the cards and board games and have some fun while using critical math concepts to strategize a big win.

 

When children understand the value math has in their lives, they are much more likely to find it intriguing and useful. Math is critical in daily life and the sooner that children recognize this, the more likely they are to respect and appreciate learning math. By incorporating math skill development into an already fun time of year, it’s easier for kids to see math as valuable and fun.

We hope you enjoy the upcoming holiday season with your family. Wishing you togetherness, joy, fun and lots of great learning opportunities!