Fun Math Activities to Do At Home!
Now that your kids are back in school, they may feel bogged down by traditional math teaching methods. Breaking the books doesn’t work for every student. It is important to remember that every student learns differently and better from different techniques. These fun math games below are some that you can play with your child to show them the different ways that they can engage with numbers!
Here is a fun activity for your child to learn both mathematics and financial planning. Give your child a hypothetical budget and a list of things needed for the house. These would be your groceries, toiletries, and other household needs. Have them go online, or take them to the store, and see if they can get everything the family needs into a shopping cart and stay within budget. Strategic spending is an exercise in budgeting that is helpful for your child to learn. It is beneficial for them to do for their math knowledge, as well as their budgeting skills.
You can turn your recycling into a geometry exercise. Before you throw a box into the recycling, flatten it, and investigate the box with your child. The broken-down shape is much different than what it originally was, and they will notice that. Ask them what a broken-down triangle would look like. Or a broken-down sphere. The new perspective helps your child visualize the many forms that shapes can take and how figures come together to form unique shapes. You can the game further and print out some kits to build shapes from broken-down templates. These are all fun ways in which you can engage your child with geometry.
Children spend a significant amount of time on the TV or their phones typically, so why not try to turn this into an opportunity for math learning? Get your hands on a stopwatch and spend some time in front of the TV with your child. Track how much time a TV show runs for compared to how much time commercials take up. Then use this to calculate the ratio of TV to commercial within an hour. This practice can teach your child how to calculate proportions—getting them familiar with fractions and percentages concerning a whole. It is also just a fun way to turn TV time into mathematics time!
This game will need multiple participants. Find a beach ball, and write numbers all over it. Then toss the ball back and forth with all players keeping track of the number their right thumb is nearest when catching the ball. As each player catches the ball, they should add their number to the previous number to get the highest sum. The game combines catch with mathematics to make a fun way to practice addition with your child. (For more advanced players, add fractions, negative numbers, or decimals.)
Each of these games is a fun way to bring math into your home. It amplifies all the fun of numbers with none of the stress of tests or textbooks. Playing these with your child is a great way to get them excited about math and explore math, finding what interests them. Each of these games can help them a great deal, figuring out how they like to learn math and go on to be star mathletes.
