Keep Your Child's Math Skills Sharp This Summer

The flowers are blooming, the birds are chirping, and summer is just around the corner!  While planning activities for your child this summer, consider including activities to keep their minds engaged.  Educators are predicting students are falling behind more than ever due to the sudden changes in learning students have experienced over the past year and a half.  Without the stress of homework and tests, summer is the perfect time to reinforce their math learning in a fun and engaging way.  Keep reading for some fun ways to keep your child's math skills sharp this summer!

Family Activities

Visit a local science museum: Many science museums have interactive sections for a hands-on experience that takes learning to a new level.  Take your child to visit a local museum and enjoy learning about science and inventors!  Science is applied math–be sure to discuss with your child how math is incorporated in the discoveries you make as you explore the wonders of science.

Cook Together:  Cooking is not only a fun way to make delicious treats but it can also be used as a great learning tool for measuring and proportional thinking.  We recommend starting with something simple for new or younger chefs, such as a smoothie or a milkshake. Once your child has the recipe mastered, ask them to double it or to make it challenging, have them half it to make a smaller serving size. As your child progresses, you can introduce and scale more complex recipes, such as cookies.  Don't forget to share the treats you create!

Play board games:  Board games are a fun way to encourage family bonding.  Most board games incorporate math in some way.  Games such as Life and Monopoly include managing money while games like chess and checkers encourage strategy and thinking ahead.  Even games like Trouble and Sorry reinforce adding and counting.  Each week set some time aside to play a game or 2 to keep up those math skills!

Start a Business:  Whether it's babysitting, dog walking, even mowing yards, or selling a product they create, a small business teaches children how to manage time and money.  Plan out a schedule and make a list of everything that is needed to get things running.  Help them create a budget so they can plan for their business expenses as well as save their money towards a goal.  A fun goal for your child might be once they earn enough money, they can buy 50 or 100 business cards (usually costs around $10 - $25 plus shipping) they can share with friends and family.

Traveling Games

Planning on traveling this summer?  There are several fun games to play to pass the time.  Put an educational spin on some classic games to make passing the time more fun!  Below we include a few examples of our favorite games to play while traveling!

Shape Scavenger Hunt:  Before heading out, make a list of shapes (for younger children, include a picture of the shape as well to help them out).  Using this list, have your child try to find each shape on the trip.  You can even make it a competition to who can find and identify the most shapes!

License Plate Math:  Pick a number and try to use the numbers in a license plate to add, subtract, multiply and divide to get that number.  To make it more challenging, create word problems using words that start with the letters on the license plate too!

20 Questions - Number Edition:  This game is played similar to the standard "20 Questions" game.  In this version, a person will pick a number instead.  Have one person think of a number but don't tell anyone. Then the others ask "yes" or "no" questions to try to figure out what that number is.  The goal is to figure out what is guessed in the least amount of questions.  For younger children, limit the number to be between 1 and 10 while using simple questions such as "is the number even" or "is it less than 8".  For older children, you can do up to 100 or even 1,000.  If your child is looking for a real challenge, you can include fractions, decimals, or even negative numbers.

Summer Education Program

Taking your child to a learning center is a great way to have them engage in learning activities.  Many learning centers offer not only programs to keep your child’s brain active, but also STEM camps and game nights to socialize and learn at the same time!  

Catch Up and Keep Up: If your child is struggling to keep up, there are most likely gaps in their math knowledge that is holding them back.  Fundamental learning gaps hinder students from mastering current grade-level topics.  By filling in those gaps and building numerical fluency, students have a better understanding of how math works and more confidence in their own abilities.  Our program is designed to target those gaps in knowledge. Students work at their own pace, allowing for more time to be focused on more challenging topics.

Get Ahead and Stay Ahead: For those who are on track or are looking to get ahead, summer is the time to begin introducing topics for the upcoming school year, students are prepared to begin the school year off right.  This is especially great for students who will be entering more challenging math topics, such as pre-algebra, Algebra 1 & 2, or Geometry–these topics can be difficult even to students who never struggled with math previously.  Having a jumpstart with Mathnasium will give your child a boost to start the school year off strong!

Whatever your plans are for the summer, be sure to keep your child active not just physically, but mentally too!  These activities will help keep your child learning while having fun.  Have more questions about how to keep up on your child's math learning over the summer?  Give us a call at (405) 324-4005!