Elementary Math Activities You can Do at Home With Your Child

Incorporating elementary math activities and practice in the home with your third, fourth or fifth grader is easier that you think. Here are lots of ideas you can use to strengthen arithmetic skills just through normal household activities:

For Third Grade Math:
Third Grade is a wonderful year for math practice in the home. Your third, fourth and fifth grade child should know addition and subtraction, pretty well, and probably feels energized by the “grown up math" of multiplication she is learning.

She is old enough to solve real problems with math, but young enough to think it’s all a game, with you helping to keep the attitude positive. You can give her practice almost every step of the day.

Getting dressed: I noticed you have 8 pairs of socks in your drawer. So how many socks do you have all together?

In the car: We’re going to need to get gas on the way to school. I think we’ll get 12 gallons. If gas is $4 per gallon, how much will we spend? (Watch the pump to see.)

Fourth Grade Math and Fifth Grade Math:
You can do all the above activities, plus try some of the following.

Cooking: Increasing or decreasing a recipe is the perfect elementary math activity to practice multiplication and division by two or three, and lays the gound work for the concept of proportion, coming up in Middle School.

It also is an excellent arena for internalizing fraction concepts. For example, if you are doubling a recipe that calls for ½ c sugar, you can let your child dump the ½ c measure twice into the 1 c measure to really see that 2 * ½ = 2/2 = 1. Your child will be energized by any math job you delegate, like working out quantities, or time.

For example, don’t use a timer – if the cookies need fifteen minutes, just tell your child to tell you when fifteen minutes are up (this involves both telling time and addition – it might be too difficult if you cross over an hour however).

For great ideas for cooking with kids, food science experiments, and food crafts, please visit Kids-Cooking-Activities.com.

Games and Hobbies that Encourage Elementary Math Activities:
In general, the more "hands on" the activity is (compared to the passivity of television or many computer pastimes), the more math there is. Even a primarily verbal game such as Scrabble involves continual mental math to calculate and compare the values of different plays (addition and multiplication).

Coin Collecting: I highly recommend coin collecting as a math-rich hobby. Children can learn addition and subtraction, multiplcation, place values and more. Here's a detailed article about how to get started.

More Math Games I recently came across Learn-With-Math-Games.com, a site loaded with free math games and activities for improving math skills. Look there for even more ideas.

Build Scale Model Aircraft or Model Rockets Help your child understand proportions and even basic geometry when you get involved in these exciting hobbies. Visit Aviation For Kids to learn how one father encourages these math-rich activities with elementary-age his son.

Work on Concentration Skills, too: Loss of concentration is one of the main reasons children make careless mistakes while taking a math test. Here are some fun tips to help your child develop his concentration abilities.

If Uncle Bill, who’s four years older than you, comes up in conversation, ask "How old will Uncle Bill be when I am 40?" This might seem silly or tiresome to an adult, but to an elementary aged child it is natural and interesting.

It is amazing how much math you can do this way!


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