Teaching Kids Basic Math

For many people, math is one of the most dreaded subjects. It brings back nightmares, and it’s something they just don’t want to deal with at all. On the other hand, some people really love math. It seems to be an extremely divisive subject - there’s not much middle ground.

I am one of those people that really loves math, and am fortunate to understand it pretty easily. Putting numbers together and including random letters (x) in there doesn’t really bother me. My wife is the opposite - she has never liked math, and when she had to take math for college, it was tough.

Fortunately, teaching young kids math is generally an easier task than trying to solve hard algebra problems. When your kids are old enough to be in those types of classes, then you may need to hire a tutor if they're struggling, and you’re unable to understand. As they’re just getting into math, there are a few things you can do to help them out.

Use common objects to teach math

For young children, they may not even know that what they’re doing is math. However, this is the perfect time to get them thinking and hearing about math problems in the real world. As an example, think about math problems when you’re eating. When you put food on your child’s plate, tell them how much you’re adding to the plate: you had 2 chicken nuggets and I gave you 1 more, now you have 3 chicken nuggets. You had 3 chicken nuggets and you ate 2, now you have 1.

You can do the above with most anything, not just food. Count how many blocks or other toys that your child has. Take a few away, give a few back, and speak to them about those numbers. While your child may not actually say the numbers right now, the goal is to build a foundation for understanding in both how adding and subtracting work in real world problems.

As your child grows older and starts to actually learn addition and subtraction in a school environment, you’ll have set a base already for them. You can continue to use common household objects to help them understand the problems they’re working on. We commonly used crayons or colored pencils with our son, simply because we had a lot and they were close by. But really any item will work. Work on reading through the problems that they have, grouping the items together as described and working through figuring out how to do the grouping themselves.

Use flash cards

Your child needs to understand the basic ideas behind math, but at some point, you’ll want them to just memorize very basic numbers. Your child will know that 1+1=2, but will they know 7+5 or 8+7? At first, you want them to understand how these concepts work, and understand how to figure out how to solve these problems. However, after they’ve got the understanding, you want them to just know the basics.

By memorizing the basic values, they can really focus on learning newer concepts and skills more easily. Generally, the easiest way to memorize math problems is to use flash cards. There are other methods that can be used also, but quickly looking at a set of numbers will help your child to memorize the basic formulas.

We bought a basic set of flash cards which goes up to 12 (12+12 and 12-12). At first, my son struggled with the cards, but eventually he actually found he really enjoyed them. In fact, it’s all he wanted to do for a while to practice math at home. He seemed to find the challenge of trying to remember the answers, and getting them all right.

Encourage and cheer them on

Most importantly, as with almost all things that you’re trying to teach as a parent, make sure to encourage and cheer your child on. If they make a mistake, or are struggling with a concept, it’s the perfect time to encourage them that they have made a lot of progress already and that it takes time to learn. Tell them that they can do it.

When they do learn something new, be sure to celebrate the success. It’s hard in the middle of learning concepts that are unfamiliar to them, and making sure to celebrate new things they’ve learned will help them to move on through the next challenges ahead. It will work as a motivator to help them get to that next milestone in their math journey.

Conclusion

While the above suggestions are for beginnings in math, you can do many of the same things as you move into multiplication problems, and more advanced concepts. Flash cards are great for memorization, and encouragement and celebrations are always important.