(303) 979-9077
(303) 979-9077
[email protected]
Bored in Math Class?
Learning is invigorating, exciting, and stimulating. Learning new skills is cause for celebration and pride. But sitting through a lecture you don’t need and practicing a skill you can do easily is boring. Accelerated and advanced math students often receive instruction that is not aligned with their abilities. The misalignment puts them at risk for low achievement and behavior problems in math class. Even worse, they may decide that math itself is boring.
Can you imagine being forced to practice a skill an hour every day that you can already do easily? Wouldn’t you start to doodle, daydream, or chat to your neighbor? Wouldn’t you start dreading that subject and that hour every day? As adults, we have an obligation to talented young mathematicians to challenge their brain and get them excited about math.
Children who quickly master math concepts need challenges to remain engaged. These challenges encourage them to pursue STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) topics further and get excited about learning. This prevents accelerated and advanced math students from dropping out of math early due to boredom. Do not confuse challenging students with trying to race through a variety of math topics, geometry one week and algebra the following week. It means investigating math topics in depth, giving students a chance to apply the skills in a variety of ways, and then progressing to the next skill level within a topic.
1. Have Fun with Math Games
Surprisingly, many students who have an innate math ability don’t bother to memorize basic facts, because it takes some extra effort they aren’t used to putting forth. Rote memorization is important even for accelerated students because numerical fluency and memorized math facts frees up the brain for high level mathematical reasoning. Children who understand basic operations, like addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, should memorize the related math facts. But when was the last time you got out flashcards for fun? Math games and apps make rote memorization more fun than flashcards.
Here are some great online math games to get started.
http://www.mathplayground.com/ASB_Index.html
https://www.ixl.com/math/
http://www.abcya.com/
Here are some great math games Mathnasium of Littleton uses to help students warm up before their math workout. These can be purchased on Amazon or are often at Target and other local stores.
Ball of Whacks!
99 or Bust
7 ate 9
Blink
Albert’s Insomnia
Rubik’s Cube
In addition, we use our Mathnasium branded deck of cards (numbered 0 -12 with no face cards) to play numerous games and keep numerical fluency fresh. Bright math students can even come up with their own games and teach their friends and family.
2. Try Math Puzzles
Math puzzles challenge students to apply their mathematical reasoning skills in unique and novel ways. If your child doesn’t need any more practice on a skill, perhaps their math homework can be a fun math puzzle instead of a worksheet. For kids who are used to always getting the right answer quickly, these puzzles teach perseverance. Here are some great online math puzzle resources.
http://www.coolmath4kids.com/math_puzzles/index.html
http://mathschallenge.net/archive
http://www.mathsisfun.com/puzzles/index.html
3. Compete with Other Math Students
In school, the top 10% of math students are not getting challenged as often as they should. The top 1% rarely get challenged at all. These children tend to get complacent about learning math because they are already far ahead of their classmates. But it’s a big world and there are great math brains everywhere. A friendly math competition may be just the ticket to spark interest for a child. Many schools have math clubs that host fun competitions. Math Olympiads are math contests similar to spelling bees with international participation. Other math competitions are longer. For elementary and middle school check out
http://www.moems.org/ and https://www.mathcounts.org/programs/competition-series and http://www.noetic-learning.com/mathcontest/. For high school students look at https://www.imo-official.org/ and http://www.usamts.org/
4. Enter Contests
Math is a beautiful language to describe the physical world and patterns. Give accelerated math students a chance to flex their creative muscle and apply their math skills to real-life design. Too many creative individuals end up frustrated with math teachers insisting on a correct answer all the time. Contests challenge students to solve problems creatively and apply their mathematical reasoning. In addition to school sponsored science fairs, many corporations sponsor STEM contests. Take a look at these for a start.
http://www.conradchallenge.org/
http://www.firstinspires.org/robotics/fll
http://rocketcontest.org/index.cfm
5. Join a Math Club
Many schools offer before-school and after-school math clubs. These clubs are a great way to meet like-minded friends. Math will get elevated, from being just a subject in school, to being a social activity. This is especially important with adolescents who may feel awkward in math class. Girls will also appreciate the opportunity to expand their social circle to incorporate a skill set society has historically undervalued in them.
6. Get Instruction Aligned to the Student’s Level
If the child’s school is unable, or unwilling, to instruct at the level your child needs to feel challenged and excited by math, then find a place that will. The no-risk assessment at Mathnasium of Littleton will help identify exactly where your child’s math strengths lie. The results of the assessment will help instructors find the math level that is challenging without being overly frustrating. As a result, each child learns something every visit. That is one of the secrets to our success, because learning is great fun!
Think of the pride and self-confidence boost you get when you achieve something difficult. Accelerated math students are often robbed of those feelings at school because the math instruction is not aligned to their pace.
Call or text Suzie today and schedule your child's free math assessment. Soon your child will be telling you what exciting new skill they learned in math.
