When your child is wrestling with multiple learning challenges, such as dyslexia, language deficits, or dysgraphia, it’s easy to put struggles with math on the back burner. Math skills often get glossed over in terms of remediation, especially when compared to reading, but it is just as important to shore up these skills.
When people think about math, they often comment, “When will I (or my child) ever use this?” but take a moment to think about how often we utilize math as an adult. It’s relatively easy to make of a list of everyday consumer activities that involve math.
Here are just a few examples:
- Shopping
- Cooking
- Balancing your checkbook
- Creating a budget
- Online banking
- Computing distances and travel times
- Planning how long an assignment or task will take
- Finding the best deal on a purchase
A primary goal of Educational Therapy is independence, and easy maneuvering with math is an essential component of your child being able to navigate the world outside of your home. As an ET, I am committed to ensuring my students are proficient and have confidence with the following math threads:
- the four operations (adding, subtracting, multiplication and division)
- fractions, decimals and percents
- measurement
- foundational skills of place value and number theory
As adults, math is one of those areas that is easy to make jokes about and claim a lack of expertise with. This probably stems from a lack of comfort with our own skills under pressure, but let me reassure you… Even if you’re not a math genius, there are still strategies you can implement at home that will improve your child’s skills with numbers.
There are tons of great smartphone and tablet apps available to help make learning math more like a game than a chore, such as Math Practice (iOS), Number Line (iOS), Hop the Number Line (iOS), Fractions and Decimals (iOS), Prodigy (Android, iOS, online), Math Fact Master (iOS), Math Balance (Android, iOS), Division for Kids (Android), and Math Edge (iOS). You can also play more traditional card games with your child that require some knowledge of math to complete, such as Blackjack (21), War, and Racko.
Online lesson plans, videos and step-by-step instructions are also available, to help you provide homework help for your child. I recommend checking out the Kahn Academy, a nonprofit that provides a free, comprehensive online education. Click here to view a sample lesson on equivalent fractions.
Finally, provide your child with a taste of real world experiences with math as often as possible. Take them to the grocery and have them figure out which soup is the least expensive to buy or how much one item in a 2 pack might cost. Give them an allowance for completing their chores and then help them create a budget and/or save for items they’d like to purchase in the future.
The aim is to help your child feel more comfortable with numbers, so that the math skills they need are being developed simultaneously, alongside their reading abilities.
Which of these suggestions will you implement first? Are you already incorporating math into your child’s activities? Let me know in the comments below.
