How can I help my child make fewer careless mistakes?

I know it can be frustrating to watch your child struggle with any academic subject, especially math.  It can also be frustrating if “careless mistakes” cause lower grades. Here are some problem-solving skills to help you through this process.

What is the root cause of the mistakes being made?  There are three types of math errors:

Careless:  is your child rushing through their work and/or not paying attention?

Computational:  is your child making mistakes when doing addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division problems?

Conceptual:  does your child not understand what they are doing “big picture?”

To help with Careless and Computational errors, have your child slow down and go methodically step-by-step. If they skip a step, have them fill in the missing step - even if they get the correct answer.  This helps a great deal with accuracy, especially with larger numbers.

When working through word problems, have your child circle key information as they read through the problem.  This process informs their strategic thinking and ensures they catch all important pieces of information.

Conceptual errors, on the other hand, are actually “clueless guesses,” not “careless mistakes.”  These types of errors reflect a lack of foundational skills needed to successfully solve the problem.  Encouraging a child to stop and look at their answer and answering the question “Does this answer make sense?” can help identify these foundational gaps.

Since it’s tough for a math classroom to go back and re-teach key skills from years past, what can you do? In this situation, enlist the help of an experienced math teacher to diagnose and then fill in foundational gaps. Teaching for mastery and not just awareness will help tremendously.  Mathematical thinking skills go much deeper than basic computation -- and are needed when heading into Algebra and beyond.

In most situations, the above solutions (and plenty of patience and encouragement!) will help your child. We’d be happy to help guide you in this process - our effective Instructors and efficient methods help kids get better at math - and have fun in the process!  Give us a call: (207) 536-6888!