Growth mindset, the belief that we can keep learning and getting better at math, is very important in supporting children to become mathematicians. When children focus on problem solving rather than on getting the right answer they learn more. Your words and attitude matter! You can foster a positive attitude toward math: Find ways to incorporate enjoyable math activities and math talk into regular activities like cooking, setting the table, and going for a neighborhood walk.
Find math activities that YOU enjoy and feel confident doing. Change can be hard. If math makes you anxious, accept your feelings and thoughts. It helps them to recognise, create and describe patterns, which is essential for early problem solving skills.
Introducing maths to children from an early age helps to develop their understanding of all elements of problem solving and reasoning in a broad range of contexts. Practitioners need to be able to provide opportunities for children to practice their developing skills and knowledge so they improve their competence and confidence in using them. All children can be successful with maths provided they are given the opportunities to understand it in a way that makes sense to them Ensuring children are engaged, motivated and thinking critically for themselves is vital for mathematics.
How many have we got? You can encourage these skills in a number of ways including:. There are of course a huge number of ways you can help your child practice their numeracy skills at home, but these are just some of the ways you can help young brains to make mathematical sense of the world around them.
Children who struggle with numeracy are also likely to be children with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties, even taking into account factors such as background and general ability. This makes the early teaching of maths, and fast intervention in the case of struggling pupils, essential to set the right path for numeracy for life. Without highlighting specific careers which use maths, it is easier to look at how not learning maths has a detrimental effect on our lives.
Further to the examples of maths in everyday life, there are benefits to being numerate. Not least our ability to find bargains, spend wisely, be on time, and to work out multiple life decisions each day. On top of that there are, of course, careers where maths is incredibly useful and often necessary. There are jobs which use maths in more traditional and obvious ways — architecture, science, computer programming, accountancy and so on.
But also there are careers which rely on maths which may not be so obvious — sportsmen and women who calculate distance and speed, as well as angles and trajectory; and carpenters and builders for whom a miscalculation could cost them a job or their business. The OECD the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has found a direct relationship between wage distribution and numeracy skills, which is a good motive for making maths a part of everyday life from a young age!
Although good mathematical skills and understanding are important to embed at a young age, it is also important to keep up the study and practice of maths even if just in short ten minute bursts each day.
A great example of a quick maths activity you can do with your child is the Number Facts Paper Flip which takes just 10 minutes! We start, as children, to use mathematical concepts as part of speech very early on, but without an awareness of the mathematics behind them. Children learn the difference between things we are close to or far away from, it is only through studying maths that they can start to apply this to working out exactly how far away something is, or the impact on the scale and size of the object.
When studying maths regularly they start to apply more in-depth knowledge and skills to their early understanding. It is also important in the study of maths to remove any possible misconceptions which children can have when they learn maths on their own as a natural part of growing up. This can help them to understand why maths is so important.
It is vital that throughout their schooling they have opportunities to explore misconceptions and work through their understanding of these, finding new methods to work out what they thought they knew.
A very common example of this is when multiplying a number by ten. This is an understandable misconception as we, by our nature, look for patterns in things around us. However, when the child is then given the calculation 5. Not only can this make it difficult for the child to move forward into more complex calculations, it can also massively knock their confidence and take a while for them to find their feet again with their understanding of number.
We must ensure, through the study of maths, that we take no shortcuts at any age, as each step in numeracy builds on the last. Studying maths also allows us to find more efficient methods which save us time, and to work out maths much quicker mentally than we would be able to relying on paper and pencil, or a calculator. You have heard, in the 21st Century, the argument that we no longer need to know a load of mental maths as we all have calculators smartphones on our pockets.
However, it is not always obvious, even, using a calculator, what we need to work out and which steps to go through, so knowing basic number skills by heart, such as times tables, is a key component. An extreme example of when mental maths would come to the fore would be in the operating theatre.
Nobody wants their surgeon to stop to use their smartphone to decide how much blood we can afford to lose before they intervene! This might be an unlikely example, but we definitely want to have as many numeracy skills in our mental maths toolkit as possible. This reduces cognitive load, which put simply has an impact on how much brain power we need to complete simple calculations, how flustered we become and therefore how likely we are to make mistakes in our calculations.
Even in the most everyday of examples, most of us do not take out our smartphones to work out every offer in the supermarket to decide which one is best. Even when we do use our smartphones or satnav to work out journey times and distances for us, we make then add our own decisions on whether to take route A or route B, and our reasons for that choice.
We are all still humans and our own knowledge added to the maths is what helps us to make good decisions for ourselves. Regular studying — whether of new concepts or simply revising and revisiting things we have learnt before — helps our grey matter and has been shown to improve IQ over time.
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