Math For Kids: Making Math Come Alive for your Elementary School Child

What is the importance of the accessibility of real world math for kids? What does a math-interested child look like?

Picture a child who likes the subject, approaches it with interest and enthusiasm, finds it captivating and can stay focused on it for a while, and one who can work with math successfully.

This is what we want in our children, both for a good academic experience in elementary school, and also to develop the foundation for success in the higher grades and on to college. What can we do to nurture this positive attitude about math for kids in our everyday interactions?

We can see the answer with a look at an unsuccessful elementary math student. There are many characteristics – low achievement, lack of interest, boredom or frustration with the subject – but the striking characteristic is an attitude that math is pointless, useless, an alien abstraction.

What does it have to do with me? It's the lack of connection with math that is the source of the lack of interest and then lack of success.

With a child, we can't just say, "See, isn't it interesting!" "See how useful it is!"

The phony problems in the current schoolbooks that try to show how interesting and useful math is don't fool anybody. (Example: Juan has 23 cards in his baseball card collection and Shantelle had 17. How many more baseball cards does Juan have than Shantelle? Oh, now I see how useful math is in real life!)

What we need to do is live the connectedness of math for kids. Because the reality is that children are inherently interested with numbers and their properties, shapes, attributes, comparisons, operations, and with some guidance, encouragement, and positive examples, they will readily grow in this area.

What we can do is make “real world math” a part of whatever activity we are doing with our children! Not an activity in a schoolbook, an activity in our lives. When that becomes our children's reality, we will see the positive attitudes and success we are hoping for.

Here are some examples:

In the preschool years, any form of counting is a game. You can sing counting songs with them like "One two buckle my shoe." You can ask them to count objects, at a meal (How many chicken nuggets do you have left?), on a walk (How many blue cars are over there?), while reading a book (How many cookies is the little girl eating on this page?). If you do these activities with your children, you have already achieved math success in the home!

Moving towards Kindergarten, you can introduce operations. Though you can simply ask them abstract questions: What's 3 +2, or what is three and two more, the ideal is to view the daily life situation from a mathematical perspective that the child can access, and express it. If you give her a snack of three pretzel rods and she wants a couple more, you can ask, then how many will you have altogether?

Elementary grade children are interested in money – who isn't? --- and any operation question can be put in those terms. If you are shopping together and you buy a small bag of chips for him for 25 cents: how many would two be? How many would eight be? If I buy this with a dollar bill, what will my change be? These are interesting, “real world math” questions for math practice!

The key point is, that when students see math in the world around them, math in school is pretty much natural, fun, and interesting. If we can get in the habit of showing some of the accessible math that is really there to our children, we will go along way to ensuring that they will be positive and successful students.

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