First through fifth grade
By playing with numbers in everyday life, you give your child practice moving between seeing numbers as concepts and seeing them as products of procedures. This will help your child build everyday number sense and succeed at higher level math.
“Children should never think that math is a set of rules that they need to follow.”
— Jo Boaler, Ph.D.
Key Strategies
- Number Banter. Playfully explore all the ways you could possibly express the number “six.” Example: 5+1, 8-2, 2X3, 12/2. Guide and nudge your child to come up with many different ways of expressing a particular number with addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.
- Problem-Solving Banter. Playfully solve problems with number sense, at the right level for your child, with an emphasis on finding multiple ways to solve each problem. Start with a fairly simple problem for a third grader, like 11+14, which can be thought of as 10+15 or 11+10+4.
- Estimation Banter. Help your child figure out the approximate answer to a problem, not the exact one. Pick numbers that are difficult to work with that are near numbers that are easy to work with. For example, you could ask your child: What approximately is 49+52? Answer: It’s about 50+50, or 100.
Additional Resources
Book: What’s Math Got to Do with It?: How Teachers and Parents Can Transform Mathematics Learning and Inspire Success, Jo Boaler
Math Banter