Many guardians hear the words "common core math" and immediately begin to dread the homework time that is ahead of them and their child. The truth of the matter is that your family is not alone!
Most of us learned traditional math and took classes such as Geometry, Algebra, Algebra 2, Pre-Calculus, Calculus, Statistics, etc. Since our children are learning this new approach to math, it has caused many families homework stress and lack of ability to help without hearing something along the lines of "That isn't how we are learning it at school!"
So what is Common Core math? Why was it introduced? And how can we tackle this new approach together?
To truly understand the idea of Common Core math, let's take a moment to reflect back on your child's first years in elementary school and the concepts they learned. Many of us can recall the homework assignments focusing on adding, subtracting, place value with ones and tens, money, time, and problem solving.
The general idea of Common Core is to continue to reflect back on these fundamental skills as your child advances into the next grade level and is learning a new and more advanced version of those concepts.
For example, when a child reaches second grade, they are expected to master multi-digit computation up to their hundreds place. At first, this seems overwhelming to a child but not if we break this new concept into something they already know such as place value!
If your child needs to add together 254 + 168 , have them identify the value of their ones place, the value of their tens place, and the value of their newly-learned hundreds place! Once they have used their fundamental knowledge to break up this problem, they can now tackle it by adding their ones, adding their tens and adding their hundreds to get to their final answer!
The approach taken is to reinforce to your child that they are capable of succeeding with any new concept since they have the fundamental skills in place to break it down in a way that they can understand!
If your family is stressing with Common Core math at home, contact the Common Core experts -- Mathnasium!
Phone: (858)800-4284
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