Applying Early Math Skills To Everyday Life

Learning Math is fun. Math is every day around us: the colorful clothes we wear, the amount of food we eat, the sq. ft of place we stay in, and the pattern we talk in. Imagine Math as a language and not as something to be fearful of. Research has shown that some children start developing a fear of Math sometime during their secondary grades. This is when concepts start to become complex and more abstract. When this happens, students tend to avoid spending time with math, and the images seem to feel more daunting than they are.

If we look closely, the concepts in Math, like other subjects, are interconnected, and understanding one leads to understanding the other. They’re built on top of one another, so the problem is not recognized immediately. The child may pass a grade without understanding a few concepts and without realizing that they find it difficult to cope or require scaffolding. It is evident later; sometimes, returning to the basics is too late. Sometimes, even teachers do not have the time to go through it. The curriculum is vast, and catering to students of varied needs can sometimes be challenging. So what can be done?

Educators and parents can support the children by doing small interventions as follows:

Connect Math concepts to everyday things

Patterns, colours, and shapes are all around us. Notice and talk about designs, such as how leaves grow on a tree, how birds fly home in the evening, and how necklaces and bangles are worn. Talk about fractions, taking the example of the sleeves of varying lengths we wear daily and kilograms of food we buy from the grocery store and fill our plates. Think of all the steps from growing the food to bringing it to our table, making a pizza, baking bread, etc. Help them associate quantity with numbers using everyday objects like bangles, beads, coins, etc. Practice cutting skills using child-friendly scissors to cut play-dough (can be made using atta + water) and cutting through newspapers. Talk about volume while going for a bath or while filling utensils with varying amounts of liquid. Involve children in household tasks like washing and folding clothes and discuss how many garments are being worked upon. While cleaning or washing utensils, discuss the proportion of liquid used, for example, water. Likewise, while mopping the floor, you can talk about spatial reasoning and how to orient our bodies concerning the area we want to cover. Let them create wicks for Diya and vary the pressure and twisting required.

Get involved and communicate.

Talk to your child about what was covered in school. Talk to the teacher, staff, and other students from school about what is getting covered and how they teach Math concepts. Observe the child while doing homework or performing actions that revolve around Math. Ask the child to do tasks at home independently and notice how they accomplish them; scaffold them when required.

Encourage and develop a love for Math.

Plan for simple games that revolve around basic math skills. For example, puzzles, snakes and ladders, dominoes, treasure hunts, rides, quizzes, etc. Notice and enjoy aspects of Math everywhere around us, reassuring the child that there is nothing to fear.

Expect growth and not perfection.

Please don’t fall for some children who can always do it right and wonder why your child can’t be the same. Each child has a learning curve. So let them blossom at their own time and pace. Look for the growth in your child over time and take small, more manageable and measurable steps. The child need not be perfect. Remember that a perfectionist is once a beginner.

Math is not just about numbers, addition, and subtraction, which people rush to teach children. Math is a way of life; it includes logic, spatial reasoning, problem-solving, critical thinking, inductive and deductive reasoning, and much more used in everyday life.
At Athena Global School’s international standard curriculum, we focus on the ‘story’ and ‘meaning’ behind every math concept. This makes understanding, application and retention a whole lot easier.

At various grade levels of Athena Global School, Math is taught using the Concrete – Pictorial – Abstract approach.