3 Easy Ways to Teach Your Kids Math Skills in Daily Life

Great math skills can benefit everyone, regardless of your age or stage in life. Just think about it: you don’t have to be an engineer or an accountant to use math every day. From budgeting or planning an event to cooking or buying furniture, we all use math to help us do various jobs or make smart decisions.

Developing a strong sense of numeracy and mathematics at an early age is a great foundation for any child. Here are three simple ways to teach your kids basic math skills in daily life.

Play a Counting Game

Math skills start with number recognition and counting. The next time you’re out with your family, ask your child to count all the red cars they see on the road. Next, ask them to count all the blue (or black or white or grey) cars they see. Then, have them tell you what colour they saw more of. (If your kids are older, you can ask them to figure out the difference between these two figures using subtraction). You can also help young children count the berries on their lunch plate, how many bites it takes to finish a cup of yogurt, the number of dogs at the park or even the fingers on their own hands. Anything goes!

If your child likes to watch cartoons, choose ones with an educational message. The same goes for apps on a tablet or smartphone. If they’re watching a silly puppet sing a song about numbers, they’re not just enjoying some screen time — they’re learning. Want more ideas? Check out the array of math learning games for kids of every age available at Staples.

Give Them a Problem to Solve

A lot of math knowledge centres around problem solving. There are plenty of ways to use this premise to teach kids while enabling them to assess a situation and think critically. For example, if your child asks for a treat after dinner, give them a handful of chocolate chips and ask them to divide them up equally between family members. Or, the next time you’re baking some cookies or muffins, ask them to figure out how many eggs or sticks of butter are needed to double the recipe. These simple questions result in mathematical problem solving and can be done at any age level.

If your child is older, ask them to price out the cost of a trip to a theme park or estimate the savings needed for a specific purchase. You could even give them a set dollar amount and ask them to make a weekly grocery list that doesn’t go over budget.

Give Them an Allowance

If you want to see a child learn math quickly, give them a bit of money to work with. By offering a weekly or monthly allowance, your kids will become pros at adding to their piggy bank (or bank account), subtracting as they spend, and even calculating interest in a savings account. It may help to use a jar system that encourages a combination of saving and spending. A bit of cash is a great motivator and the more practice they have, the more they’ll learn.