As a parent and teacher, getting my kids or my students to love math is like asking them to love their veggies. Quite often I will hide veggies in my kids’ favorite foods—pureed squash in meatballs, minced green peppers in spaghetti sauce, broccoli in mac ‘n’ cheese, and so on. Maybe with cooking, it’s easy to incorporate food items they don’t like but how can we creatively disguise math skills among their everyday lives?
Come on, get creative with math (think: game night)
Do you have childhood memories of playing board games with the family or friends?
Maybe you had to keep an eye on someone constantly, or they’d cheat?
Or maybe you’d break out the snacks, turn off the TV and get competitive?
Regardless of how you did it, you probably had a lot of fun. And even better, you were exercising your brain. One of the things that is great about games is they exercise the brain in a variety of ways. They can improve visual memory, auditory memory, visual and auditory discrimination. And many more of the fundamental skills needed for learning
Use your imagination
Author, Michelle McConnaha provides in the article “Game Night Teaches Families to Enjoy Learning Math Skills” practical tips on how to incorporate games with make skills.
In the article “Game Night Teaches Families to Enjoy Learning Math Skills”, teachers of Corvallis Elementary school invited their students and families to enjoy pizza and games. The students were divided according to grade level (kindergarten through fourth grade).
“The staff at Corvallis Primary School is focusing on improving the math skills of our students,” said Principal Janice Stranahan. “In support of that effort, we’ve invited families to join us for geometric pizza dinner and fun math games.”
The games utilized basic math skills such as adding, subtracting, multiplication, and division with the goal to make the games fun not overly challenging. The teachers anticipated families coming together, enjoying their kids, while re-enforcing math skills in the hope, these skills would be transposed to their home environments in the weeks to come.
Never in short supply
Perhaps you could incorporate a math family game night in yourhome? Alternatively, host your own math game and pizza night at your home with some of your kids’ class mates! You don’t have to make up an original game.
Classics like Monopoly, Bingo, Uno, etc., are great family games you may have in your home now that you can utilize to hide math in every day fun games!
We especially like Blink Card Game The World’s Fastest Game
The Learning Success System is chock full of fun, game like exercises. Specifically designed for enhancing learning ability. To help your child at home, grab your copy.
Key Takeaways:
1
Games develop fundamental learning skills
2
Games are great for building self esteem
3
Games are one of the best things you can do to help your child.
We believe that the key to success is building up the fundamental learning skills, enhancing self esteem, and incorporate the body. Games are great ways of doing some, and sometimes all of these things.
They are one of the best things you can do as a family. Especially a family interested in developing their children to the fullest.
