Tips, ideas and games for
Second Grade math practice
at home.
Any Second Grade math practice you do should be focused on your child becoming fluent in addition and subtraction with regrouping. All it takes is simply a lot of practice, most likely more than is being provided at school. This is a core step in learning and memorizing the elementary math facts.
Workbook Practice
I strongly suggest practice with a skills workbook published by Kumon , a fantastic skills enrichment company. If skills workbooks by Essential Learning Products and Continental Press are available from your school, these are also wonderful books. These are considered school text books and are a little harder to reliably locate on internet.
There is a world of difference at school between a child who plays "math games" that include thinking skills and one whose games simply include blowing up alien spaceships on the computer, believe me!
Using games to achieve Second Grade math practice
Playing "math games" with your children is a great way to achieve some second grade math practice and it can be an immense boost to him or her as a math student. Some, like Cribbage , explicitly use counting and addition in the play and the scoring. Others develop problem-solving skills as the child works out strategies to win. Checkers , Go Fish! , Rummikub and Crazy Eights are examples of this. You can get a lot of use out of a simple deck of cards !
Many games can help children develop concentration abilities, which are necessary for attention to learn a new math lesson from the teacher and also to complete arithmetic problems as they require more and more steps. To play Chess , or Sequence for example, you need to work through several moves in your head before executing a play.
Just five minutes of focused work every day, or even every other day, is a good amount of extra practice.
Motivation
An elementary school child , developmentally, is not necessarily motivated by “learning for its own sake,” or fairly abstract long-term goals like, “this will help you get into college.” : )
You get paid for work, right? This is your child’s work. If you think your child should get into the habit of doing some extra math practice with you at home, you should be prepared to put in place a structure of positive reinforcement.
One basic idea is a motivational chart . You can make a 10 X 10 grid and the child earns a sticker in a box on the grid for each page correctly done. (A check in a box on the grid would work too, but elementary age children are usually fond of stickers!) Young children need immediate feedback, so getting the sticker itself is a reward.
Then she or he should get a medium reward for each row on the grid they complete. Perhaps give a treat they don’t usually get -- maybe a dollar bill or coin if you don’t like food-based rewards – something of value to your child, but relatively modest.
When the entire chart is completed, a big reward should be given – something that takes time more than money, and doesn’t happen often. Being taken bowling and then out for an ice cream by a busy parent is an example of a reward that I’m sure any second grader would love to work to achieve.
When is extra practice most essential?
If your child is shaky with regrouping by Springtime in the school year, you need to get going with extra second grade math practice for sure.
Since multiplication (coming up in third grade) and division (to be learned in fourth grade) will require fast, accurate addition and subtraction, your child runs the risk of falling further and further behind if you don’t do remediation now.
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