Tips: How to get your kids into Math.

At school, children learn the concepts and skills identified for each grade and there are five major areas, or strands, of mathematics. The names of the five strands are: Number Sense and Numeration, Measurement, Geometry and Spatial Sense, Patterning and Algebra, and Data Management and Probability. You will see these strand names on your child’s report card. The activities in this guide are connected with the different strands of the curriculum.

What tips can I use to help my child?

• Be positive about math!
• Let your child know that everyone can learn math.
• Let your child know that you think math is important and fun.
• Point out the ways in which different family members use math in their jobs.
• Be positive about your own math abilities. Try to avoid saying "I was never good at math" or "I never liked math".
• Encourage your child to be persistent if a problem seems difficult.
• Praise your child when he or she makes an effort, and share in the excitement when he or she solves a problem or understands something for the first time.

Encourage your child to give explanations

When your child is trying to solve a problem, ask what he or she is thinking. If your child seems puzzled, ask him or her to tell you what doesn't make sense. (Talking about their ideas and how they reach solutions helps children learn to reason mathematically.)

Suggest that your child act out a problem to solve it. Have your child show how he or she reached a conclusion by drawing pictures and moving objects as well as by using words.

Treat errors as opportunities to help your child learn something new.

How the Kids Learn?

Base on my experience as a teacher, there are a lot of ways that the kids absorb knowledge from the teaching and learning activities performed in school. I group these into three main group:

By listening
Some kids intend more to be better in understanding something that was thought is by only listening to the teachers. This kind of pupils can learn without looking to their teacher and can learn instead they are blind. But a good teacher whose can elaborate the contents of learning will enhance this type of pupils.


By doing
Some kids learn more by doing something that related to what they are learning. By this way, this type of pupils need to be actively involve in classroom activities such as drama, experiments and activities that need they doing something...

By looking
Some kids love to see something colourful. As these type of kids sees the colorful will make them enquiries what they are seeing and can remember what they have seen longer than the other types.

Students'common misconceptions about fractions

Believing that fractions' numerators and denominators can be treated as separate whole numbers. Students often add or subtract the numerators and denominators of two fractions (e.g., 2/4 + 5/4 = 7/8 or 3/5 – 1/2 = 2/3). These students fail to recognize that denominators define the size of the fractional part and that numerators represent the number of this part. The fact that this approach is used for multiplication of fractions is another source of confusion.

Failing to find a common denominator when adding or subtracting fractions with unlike denominators. Students often fail to convert fractions to a common, equivalent denominator before adding or subtracting them, and instead just use the larger of the 2 denominators in the answer (e.g., 4/5 + 4/10=8/10). Students do not understand that different denominators reflect different-sized unit fractions and that adding and subtracting fractions requires a common unit fraction (i.e. denominator).

Believing that only whole numbers need to be manipulated in computations with fractions greater than one. When adding or subtracting mixed numbers, students may ignore the fractional parts and work only with the whole numbers (e.g., 53/5 – 21/7 = 3). These students are either ignoring the part of the problem they do not understand, misunderstanding the meaning of mixed numbers, or assuming that such problems simply have no solution.

Leaving the denominator unchanged in fraction addition and multiplication problems. Students often leave the denominator unchanged on fraction multiplication problems that have equal denominators (e.g., 2/3 × 1/3 = 2/3). This may occur because students usually encounter more fraction addition problems than fraction multiplication problems. They incorrectly apply the correct procedure for dealing with equal denominators on addition problems to multiplication.

Failing to understand the invert-and-multiply procedure for solving fraction division problems. Students often misapply the invert-and-multiply procedure for dividing by a fraction because they lack conceptual understanding of the procedure. One common error is not inverting either fraction; for example, a student may solve the problem 2/3 ÷ 4/5 by multiplying the fractions without inverting 4/5 (e.g., writing that 2/3 ÷ 4/5 = 8/15). Other common misapplications of the invert-and-multiply rule are inverting the wrong fraction (e.g., 2/3 ÷ 4/5 = 3/2 × 4/5) or inverting both fractions (2/3 ÷ 4/5 = 3/2 × 5/4). Such errors generally reflect a lack of conceptual understanding of why the invert-and-multiply procedure produces the correct quotient. The invert-and-multiply procedure translates a multi-step calculation into a more efficient procedure.

   

What is thinking skill?

• When cognitive skills are strong, academic learning is fast, easy, efficient, and even fun.
• When cognitive skills are weak, academic learning will be, at best, a struggle.
• Cognitive skills are, therefore, the essential tools for learning.

It will help immensely if you keep these points foremost in your mind as we examine mental skills more closely.

Mental or cognitive skills may seem a bit mysterious because they are not easy to see or recognize by themselves. But, without the underlying cognitive skills, you and I could not process the information received from every possible source -- sound, touch, sight, taste, and smell.