It is not unusual for a child to lose confidence in doing maths at an early age. Here are a few simple steps to restore your child's confidence in its ability to understand maths.
1. Get your child/student to explain to you how they are working out their maths problem. This will give you the opportunity to get some clues as to how they think through the problems.
By doing this you will be able to understand how to help them. Eg they may be missing out a step resulting in them getting the answer wrong. Or they may get stuck halfway in which case you can guide them to the end.
Always allow them to make an attempt first especially if they have done some work on this topic before.
2. Reassure them that they are many ways to find an answer to their problem, as long as they get there in the end. Once they have shown you the method they have used,praise them for using it and then offer another method of solving the same problem.
This will make maths fun for them, as you are now juggling or playing with numbers rather than focusing on getting it right or wrong which can be intimidating for a child.
3. Do not underestimate the power of knowing the times tables. Even if you child is ten or eleven and may have passed the stage of learning their times tables, if they don't know them ensure that they do learn them at home. This will SPEED up their ability to solve maths problems no end.
It will also give them the tools to solve problems on different ways.
It will dramatically increase their ability to do mental maths.
Give them a printout of the times tables to practise from. Teach them to look, cover and check. Ie look, then cover and recite and then if they stumble or get stuck flip their sheet/card over and check.
This way they do not feel that you are breathing down their neck or telling them off if they get it wrong.
No comments:
Post a Comment