As a parent, how should I choose the math games for my child?
by admin on Oct.08, 2009, under Math
Should I do it by myself or should I collaborate with the child and the teacher?
There are so many sites with math games! How should I know what to propose to my child?
I think that opening more sites with this subject and then trying to look in each one in order to find something you think it is interesting can generate agitation, lost of time, disorder and finally, frustration….
For good results, we surely need to organize the activity of playing math games.
- First of all, let’s decide how long we are going to spend daily (or weekly) playing math and let’s do it with our child and teacher! There are children who will want to spend 10 minutes, but the teacher could consider that the child would need more practice than that. Here start the negotiation. Other children (the future mathematicians) will want to spend hours playing only math games – discussing with the teacher (and maybe with a psychologist, if you are worried that this can damage to her/his global development) and again with your child you can leave it like this or minimize this period;
- After that, we need to know the theme which has been taught at school in the last days. For this you can check your child’s work sheets or notebooks and check with the teacher the objectives and the themes.
- If the theme is, for example, “Fractions”, you need to look first for games regarding the basic operation (the right order is in your child math book/notebook), so start looking for “basic operations with fractions”, “fractions addition”, etc. for beginner’s level. After your child is reaching the level required from the teacher you can look for advanced exercises/games on this theme, but only if your child has special math abilities. Otherwise, it should be enough what the school is asking for.
- At the end you can look on the internet for a quiz and choose the exercises on the theme you’ve just “played” with your child and check if she/he is able to solve them correctly. If it is so and if the grades at school look better and better, then your game was successful. If not, you have to “play” more J
How are you proceeding with your child? Do you have other plans and ideas? How involved are you in your child’s math play? Sharing our experiences could improve our children’s performance and fun.
