There are lots of things that kids love about summer but it’s probably safe to say none of them involve doing math. Yet has shown practising math during the summer helps to stem what educators call “summer learning loss."
Kids can lose more than two months of grade level equivalency in math over the summer, the research has found, and that loss can become cumulative, worsening year after year.
But there are lots of ways to helps kids stay on top of their geometry, algebra, and 1-2-3’s this summer without sending them to summer school, says Susan Gerofsky, an assistant professor in the department of curriculum and pedagogy at the University of British Columbia.
Here are a few of them.
Think beyond the workbooks
One might assume the best way to practise math at home is with workbooks. And while such books have their uses, worksheets of long division are not really what can make math fun, says Gerofsky.
“It’s not that drills and memorization are useless… it’s that, for a lot of people, math means just a lot of drudgery and painful repetition,” she says.
“But for those of us who love math, the reason we love is because it’s about life.
Math arises in the patterns of nature, in art -- everywhere.”
Which is why Gerofsky advises parents to get outside and look for those patterns all around them, just like the earliest mathematicians did.
For example, Fibonacci noticed a fascinating math patter something called phyllotaxis in the way that leaves and petals grow. He also saw fascinating sequences in pinecones, pineapples, sunflowers, and rabbit breeding. Once you learn how to start looking, math patterns are everywhere.
Watch math videos
YouTube is filled with lots of great, educational, well-produced videos about math that parents and kids can watch together. Gerofsky particularly likes the videos of Vi Hart, who did on Fibonacci sequences and how they occur in nature.
Hart also has great videos about all kinds of fascinating things, including , and .
“They’re super-fun to watch and she is not sort of a internet superstar for her great math videos,” Gerofsky says.
If you don’t fully understand the math concepts being discussed in the videos, that’s okay too, Gerofsky says. In fact that’s great, because you can explore the concepts together.
“It’s wonderful if the adults in kids’ lives can express curiosity and wonder about how the world works. That’s quite infectious in kids,” says Gerofsky.
“It’s better than saying, ‘You must do all these exercises before lunch.’ That sounds more like a punishment than an exploration.”
Get interested in math yourself
We’ve long been told that the best way to foster great readers is for parents to read with their kids. Through daily bedtime stories, kids grow up seeing reading as a pleasure and something you share and talk about with the people you love.
“But we rarely do that with math in Canadian culture,” Gerofsky says. Instead, we often view math as difficult but necessary work.
But by sitting down and doing puzzles together, or working on logic riddles or numbers-based board games, parents who get involved can help their kids learn to love math.
“What I’ve noticed is the kids who are most comfortable with math and who are most adapt with it share explorations with their parents, just like they share bedtime stories,” says Gerofsky.
Try some online games
There are some great board games that can teach kids arithmetic, like Monopoly, but there are plenty of others that can introduce math in different ways.
Logic games like Sudoku or Mastermind force kids to work out permutations, for example. Chess and Rubik’s cubes do the same. Even Tetris and the Canadian-made Good Fences teach spatial awareness and concentration.
Gerofsky really likes the board game Rush Hour and the similar app Unblock Me, both of which require moving pieces to help a red car get out of a tight parking spot.
“I like doing it myself on the bus, in the doctor’s waiting room, wherever; it’s challenging and so much fun,” she says.
These games are often about using logic and sequencing to think ahead -- a useful skill not only to budding mathematicians, but aspiring scientists, lawyers and carpenters too -- just about anyone, in fact.
Make math active
Finally, while many parents and kids dread memorization, it’s often the best way to learn times tables and other essential skills. So to make the memorization fun, try adding in movement.
Gerofsky says when she was a girl, she remembers a lot of skipping and clapping games that involved counting.
“So we’d have skip counting in a song or a chant. And we learned those patterns without an awful lot of thought; we just did it as part of our game,” she says.
Music can also help. There’s the classic tune “,” and the surprisingly infectious counting songs of .
Considering the research showing kids sit far too much, and learn better with lots of exercise breaks, get young learners moving while they practise their 1-2-3’s.
