Maths

Helping your child with maths need not just be about getting them to learn their tables or making them do endless pages of sums.

As with reading and writing, it's important that your child realises that maths is an essential part of everyday life. You can help him understand this by letting him see you use counting, adding up and so on (for instance, checking your change in the shop).

Here are some ideas for activities you can do with your child.

Number

  • Teach him counting games and songs like "There Were Ten in the Bed" and "Ten Green Bottles".

  • Play boardgames such as Ludo and Snakes and Ladders, where you have to count to go round the board.

  • Sort and match objects - pairs of shoes; knives, forks and spoons; cups and saucers.

  • Count money - how many pennies, five pence pieces etc? Later, you can get your child to work out how much change to expect, or how much several items of shopping will cost.

  • Work out how much shopping you need - how many cans of dog food you need to last a week, how many more cartons of fruit juice you must buy so she can have one a day in her lunchbox.
Measures

  • Talk about longer and shorter, heavier and lighter.

  • Play with water and sand, pouring from one container to another. Introduce words like full and empty. Discuss whether different shapes of container hold more or less, or the same amount.

  • Play with weights, including weighing ingredients for cooking. Again, use appropriate language.

  • Learn to tell the time, starting with the hours and moving on to half and quarter hours.
Shape and Space

  • Talk about the shapes you can see around you - such as triangles, rectangles, squares, circles. What makes one different from another?

  • Stack boxes and cans from the store cupboard. Can your child make them fit together without any space between? How many ways can they be stacked?

  • Make repeating patterns on paper. If you have three different shapes, how many different patterns can you make? What about with four? Or five? Can you make a pattern without leaving any space between the shapes (no overlapping!)? Are there any shapes you can't do this with?

  • Similarly, build shapes out of Lego.

  • Explore symmetry by folding paper in halves and quarters and cutting out patterns, or by drawing a pattern on one side of the paper and copying it on the other. Or make "butterflies" by splashing paint on a piece of paper and folding it in half.
Maths Crib Sheet

Helping your child at home