Fun Games to Increase Your Child’s Interest in Math
When children are young, they are not very reluctant to count objects with their fingers or colorful beads and such fun objects. But as the subject of math grows tougher with their subsequent grades, they start losing interest. As soon as a child starts to feel even slightly scared by math, it can activate a tendency of avoidance, anxiety and poor performance. You can support your children, both girls and boys, to admire and “enjoy” math in various ways, like these Singapore math worksheets.
Fun with Numbers
At kindergarten level, children come across an array of math essentials. They learn to identify numbers, count things and know sequence of numbers (such as 4 comes before 5 or 11 comes after 10, etc). They also learn to identify basic shapes like a book is rectangular or a coin is circular.
What you can do is to place various food items your child loves mixed and ask her/him to take each item out separately in different bowls. Associate simple questions with this, like how many items are there in total, how many will they be if the child adds two more to each, how many if s/he eats three, etc. Don’t put forth too difficult questions, to retain her/his interest. Also let her/him do whatever they want with the objects like arranging them in various shapes, segregate them as per preference or pile or stack them to make towers. Encourage (not force) to count the items during her/his play and include simple addition-subtraction questions. The aim of the game is to make the child think that numbers are fun (not boring).
Fun with Shapes
Next your child will be introduced to 1’s and 10’s place values and geometric shapes. Here you can involve your child in making play dough and measure the ingredients along with identify the difference between a teaspoon and a tablespoon, half cup and full cup, etc. Once the play dough is made, help your child to make basic shapes from it like triangles, squares, circles and rectangles. Let her/him identify the sides each shape contains, and also difference between square and rectangle if possible.
Fun with Money
Next your child will come across big numbers – place values of 100 and 1000, and addition-subtraction from multiples of 100, units of measurements, etc. At this stage, you can introduce them to money transaction by opening a store where there will be miscellaneous things of your child’s choice and you can transact with play money. Let the price tags be simple and in round figures.
You can trigger your creativity and find out many such fun games for your child according to their curriculum, and make them enjoy the company of numbers. Remember that all through the process, you have never to force them to do anything what you want; you should allow them to do what they want. Visit SGTeachers.com to get various ideas to grow your child’s interest in studies. Slowly, they will start loving math and you will never find a problem in their math studies.
