Applying Math to Everyday life
Practice estimating skills around the house.
Use money to teach your child about math—and budgeting!
Practice telling time and reading time with an analog clock or watch.
Adapted from: mathisfun.com and ncdl.org
- Ask your child to estimate the total cost of a few items purchased, distance, temperature or angles in an architectural structure; then compare to the actual number. Check actual measurements using receipts, GPS, Google Maps, rulers, tape measures, thermometers, weather.com or Google Earth.
- Color code measuring cups and spoons, marking the ¼ teaspoon and ¼ cup red, and the ½ teaspoon and ½ cup blue. Adding visual clues can help children to identify similar measurements and fractions. The next time you're in the kitchen, have your child help you measure out the ingredients by using these tools.
Use money to teach your child about math—and budgeting!
- Do you give your children allowance? Working with them to spend even a very small amount of money in a store can help them practice addition and subtraction.
- Cook or bake with your child. Ask your child to pick his favorite recipe to make and buy the items together in the grocery store. Challenge older children to do the math and double the recipe or double the budget.
- While at a restaurant or while traveling discuss the concept of tipping and have your older child calculate the tip.
- See if your bank has an online program to teach your child about saving money. Start an "online" piggy bank.
Practice telling time and reading time with an analog clock or watch.
- Consider engaging your child in the process of choosing and then buy your child the analog watch of choice to wear.
- Make sure you have at least one analog clock in the house, the kitchen is a great place to have one.
- Practice telling time on both analog and digital clocks.
- Create a schedule for the day with your child and connect it to what the time looks like on a clock.
- Bake a cake or something and then figure out the "now" time and the "done" time for when the cake comes out of the oven using an analog clock and/or a digital clock. Note: The clock you choose to use will be dependent on the skill you are practicing. For example: If you are just adding minutes to time then a digital clock may work, if you are adding minutes and practicing time telling then you want to use an analog clock.
Adapted from: mathisfun.com and ncdl.org
Applying Math to Game Playing
Knight's Tour and Grid Hopping Game
(Below is a great video link and challenge that deals with number theory. It is particularly useful for those interested in mathematical theory, logic and reasoning and best suited for older elementary students.)
Click (link) to Knight's Tour video
You can play this on a 10x10 grid. But also can play on smaller (or larger) grids, like 5x5 or the traditional chessboard’s 8x8. By the way, you can play it on any rectangular grid, so don’t limit yourself to a square. So here we go:
- Draw a grid
- Pick your starting cell and write “1” in it
- Move as a knight would move in chess and write “2” in the cell you land in.
- Move again and this time write “3” in the cell you land on.
- Continue until either you visit every single cell once and only once or until you cannot make another move.
Resource: MobiusSnoodles