Mathnasium of Greensboro: Back-to-School Success Starts Here!!

Q1: What advice would you give parents who want to help their child start the school year with confidence?

A1: Start shifting bedtimes, wake-up times, and meal schedules back toward the school routine a week or so prior to the start of the school year. Getting enough sleep is often overlooked as a tool for enhanced learning. While they sleep, students' brains process and create retrieval pathways for the information they've learned during the day. Sleep protects memory connections and helps them recall the information easier later. Getting enough sleep on school nights transfers information from short-term memory to long-term memory and increases what we like to call the sponge factor, the ability to hold onto the new information to apply it later.

Q2: What are some of the most common math challenges students face at the beginning of a new school year?

A2: If students haven't been practicing math skills over the summer, they may have forgotten how to perform certain operations such as finding common denominators for adding or subtracting fractions, "keep, change, flip" for dividing fractions, how to bring down digits in long division, or even the order to perform operations in multi-step problems. They might be a bit slower in processing the information. They may face a jump from concrete thinking to more abstract concepts as well, such as using variables in word problems, or visualizing three dimensions in geometry. Early support can build confidence before anxiety or self-doubt can set in.

Q3: What makes this time of year exciting at your Mathnasium center?

A3: Here at Mathnasium, we love watching students' relationships with math transform! Whether we are rebuilding confidence after the summer break or seeing them regain their momentum, we look forward to new "aha!" moments and customizing learning plans to pinpoint and patch their strengths and rusty areas. When familiar faces return, we enjoy seeing how much each student has grown while they have been away. We also look forward to setting fresh goals and celebrating all the wins along the way!

Visit our website to get your kid math-ready this school year!