Math Activities

You can help to reinforce the great learning that your child is doing at school.  Many simple activities are helpful to build number sense in a fun way.  Card games, dominos and money are all usedful tools to help develop strong numeracy skills.     Topics to foccus on at home could include: 1) identifying even and odd numbers 2) pairs of numbers that add to make ten 3) working with doubles from 1 to 10 4) extending this to include the idea of half 5) placement of larger numbers on a number line 6) making connections between fact families: knowing that 2 + 3 = 5 means you should associate that fact with 5 - 3 = 2 and 5 - 2 = 3.  Simimlarly, if you know 3 x 4 = 12, you know 12 divided by 3 = 4 and 12 divided by 4 = 3. 7) thinking of subtraction in terms of addition: for example to solve 12 - 7, think "7 plus what makes 12?" Similarly, to solve 63 divided by 9, think " 9 times what makes 63?" 8) mental math- adding 10 and multiples of ten to a number 9) read numbers in different ways: For example 3 000 can be 3 thousands or 30 hundreds or 300 tens 10) practice basic multiplication facts 11) draw attention to large numbers in the media.  Help your child to say large numbers.   There are also many great websites which have fun games to help with math basics.  Here is just a sampling:   www.learnalberta.ca              www.multiplication.com                       www.mathplayground.com www.spacetime.us                www.gamequarium.com                       www.aaamath.com www.primarygames.co.uk      www.oswego.org