Education
Making maths fun! Maths is one of those subjects that parents love to hate. It’s been a long time since we had to do maths at school, and for a lot of us, it wasn’t our favourite subject! If you don’t enjoy maths, chances are your child won’t either. Let’s break the cycle and look at everyday ways to make learning maths fun! Just as you increase your child’s vocabulary and understanding of the world by talking about what you are doing or planning, you can increase your child’s grasp of maths in the same way.
Eat the cake
Maths isn’t just adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing (though those are certainly a big part of it), it’s also measurement, shapes, quantities, order, and so many other concepts. We’re doing maths all the time without even realising it!
This is where you can introduce your child to fractions and division. When you cut a whole cake completely down the middle, you have divided it into two, and each piece is one half (½). The cake can be further sliced into quarters (¼), and eighths (⅛). By moving the pieces around, you can show that two quarters is the same as one half and four eighths.
Try these fun activities with your child to get them thinking about mathematical concepts.
Bake a cake Put the packet mix back in the pantry and bake from scratch! Get the kitchen scales and let your child discover weights and measures. Some things are measured in volume, like a cup of flour or a tablespoon of cocoa powder; others by weight, like 200g of butter; and others by quantity: two eggs. Here’s an extra step you can add just for fun… Test the freshness of your eggs before cracking them and discover their volume! Fresh eggs will always sink in water. Fill a large measuring jug with water to a line that is around ¾ of the way up. When you lower the egg into the water, it will ‘displace’ its volume of water and raise the level line. The difference between the two levels gives you the volume of the egg, e.g., if your water is now at the 750ml mark and the original water level was at the 700ml mark, your egg has a volume of 50ml… provided, of course, that it has sunk!
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See, we said maths can be fun!
Now look at what fractions are left once you take away and eat one of the pieces!
Say what? Frequency is also a mathematical concept. For this lesson, pick anything that happens on a daily basis, like the exact time your child goes to bed, the duration of their bath, the number of pages read in a book each night, or something fun like how many times your child says “I’m hungry” in a day. For one week make a note of these numbers. You can plot them on a simple graph or chart if you like, but a list of the numbers – sorted into numerical order for this lesson – is all you really need. From this you can discover the mode, mean (average), median and range. This rhyme may help your child remember which is which: Hey diddle diddle, the median’s the middle; you add and divide for the mean. The mode is the one that appears the most, and the range is the difference between. It might be surprising to find out how many times a day, on average, your child tells you they’re hungry!
Your Local Families Magazine August / September 2022 www.familiesmagazine.com.au
