“When am I ever going to have to use math in real life?"
Odds are that you’ve heard this question at least once while your child was doing his or her math homework. You may even have said the exact same thing years ago before you became an adult and realized that you use math all the time. Remember that, although you can assure your would-be mathematician that math knowledge comes in handy every day, in these kinds of situations, kids usually need to see it for themselves.
Since experiential, hands-on learning is one of the most effective ways children come to understand the world around them, we’ve compiled three resources that offer engaging everyday activities that will allow your child to see real-life math at work.
- PBS: Simple Tips for Summer Math Learning: It may not be summer anymore, but these activities never go out of season. This site doles out creative ways to turn road trips (distance and time), shopping (addition, percentages, comparison, price vs. quantity, making change), and chores such as laundry and cooking (measurements, fractions, following directions) into mathematical learning opportunities. One of our favorite suggestions is creating a learning experience around your child’s interests. For example PBS suggests:
- If a child loves to be outside and observe nature, the child could do a scavenger hunt where they have to find a specific number of leaves, rocks, sticks, etc. With an activity like this, the child is actively engaged in a real experience that is based on his specific interests.
- Kindermusik: 3 Ways Kids Unknowingly Learn Math Through Music: In our blog “Catholic Songs to Learn By,” we discussed how lyrics and melodies are excellent teaching tools. This site explains how playing, listening, and moving to music can help a child learn geometry, patterns, and numbers. Are you wondering how geometry comes into play? Kindermusik explains:
- Movement combined with words and labels like “in and out,” “up and down,” or “around and through” are helping build the spatial awareness and spatial-temporal reasoning skills that are fundamental to geometry, as well as a child’s future potential career as an engineer, a scientist, a math teacher, or even an athlete.
- Bright Hub Education: Using Football to Teach Math: Ideas for Elementary to High School: Is sports more your child’s passion? Great news: As we discussed in a previous blog, playing sports enhances learning, and now we can assure you that talking about sports does as well. This site shows how to bring addition, percentages, equations, and probability into play for an engaging lesson. It explains:
- Sports and math are a natural connection. You can't have a game without numbers. Statistics are the result of every contest. Sports are an easy way to turn abstract math into something measurable and tangible.
What are some of the other benefits of learning in a real-life context, be it math or any other subject?
The National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics states that it “help[s] us to make sense of the world around us by making links between feelings and learning … [allowing] us to transfer learning experienced outside to the classroom and vice versa.” This leads to:
- higher levels of motivation
- almost limitless resources
- an opportunity to see math as cross-curricular
- greater curiosity leading to more effective exploration
- creative ideas driving investigations
- meaningful application of problem solving strategies and thinking skills
- a heightened sense of purpose and relevance
- the all-important bridge between theory and reality
- greater independence and an improved attitude to learning
- greater enjoyment and achievement
- a realization that our environment offers opportunities for learning and enjoyment
What are some of the ways you help your child learn math in the real world? Let us know on our social media pages.