5 Tips for Better Homeschool Math

Many homeschoolers hate or even fear math. It’s the topic most likely to bring our children to tears.

In my last several posts, I’ve indulged my theoretical muse letting my thoughts wander over topics that may seem esoteric to parents in the midst of a daily struggle to help their child learn.

So today, let’s put away the theory and get practical:

• What can you do today to make learning stick?
• How can you transform tears of frustration into the satisfaction of “Aha! I get it”?

You don’t have to invest in a new curriculum to revolutionize your child’s experience of math. Just change how you use the math program you have.

Here are five tips that will help you and your child work together to build mathematical understanding.

1. Don’t Teach. Instead Ask Questions.

Don’t start a math lesson by telling your children what to do.

Human brains don’t work like computers. We can’t simply store a teacher’s instructions and then execute the program on demand.

Human memory is leaky. Our brains only store things that we have actively thought about.

So begin your math lesson by posing a problem and asking what your children think. How would they use the things they already know to figure it out?

And then shut up and wait. Don’t try to rush them to an answer. It’s hard to be patient, but give your children time to think.

Our experience of school math taught us to believe that answers are important, and “good” students produce answers quickly. But now brain science has shown that the important thing is to build mental connections, and that can take time.

Kids are resourceful. Encourage them to bring that resourcefulness, that creative thinking, to bear on math. Most topics in math follow naturally from what came before, so children who are making sense of math as they go along can often figure out the next step.

There’s Never Just One Right Answer

They don’t have to solve the problem the same way you would, or how the textbook would teach it. In math, there is always more than one way to solve a problem, and one of the joys of homeschooling is to discover how your child’s mind works differently from your own.

If you do get completely stumped on a problem, you can look back to see what the teacher’s guide recommends. Or if you make it through all of the problems, you may want to take the last five minutes of your math time to read the lesson you skipped. Now that the child’s mind has spent time reasoning about the topic, it will be prepared to consider the textbook’s method.

But don’t take their method as a rule from on high. Analyze it to see why it works.

You might say, “Now I’m curious what the book would have done. How is it like our thinking? How is it different?”

2. Use Stories to Build Understanding.

The human mind is designed for stories. It is our natural way of thinking.

In math, stories put flesh on the bare bones of an abstract number calculation. They help us visualize what is happening and understand what the numbers and symbols are trying to say.

For young children, when they have a plain-number calculation and can’t remember what the plus or minus sign means, you can turn the calculation into a story about their pet or favorite toy.

For older children who have gotten into the habit of doing calculations, challenge them to turn a calculation into a story. This makes them think more deeply about what the times or division symbol actually means.

3. Don’t Try to Do Everything.

You do not have to finish every problem in a math lesson. You do not have to finish every lesson in your math book. Remember that your textbook is not a taskmaster but a tool. It’s your choice how to use that tool.

The book is like a roadmap, showing some of the places you might go on your learning journey. But you are in charge of the adventure, deciding where to visit, how long to stay, and when to branch off on an unexpected side trip.

[For more about the journey of learning, see my post Homeschooling Math: Start Where You Are.]

Do fewer problems in more depth. Your children will learn better from working a handful of math problems out loud, explaining how they reason it through, than from sitting silently at the table filling out a whole page of problems.

Sometimes, take just a single problem and spend your whole lesson time thinking about how many different ways someone might solve it. That’s a great way to build flexible, creative mathematical thinking.

Let’s Try an Example…

Suppose your student is working on addition. Instead of doing a whole worksheet, you could pick one problem and search for new ways to see it.

If the problem was 17 + 25, what might you find?

17 is close to 20. You could add 20 + 25, and then take back the extra pieces:
17 + 25 = 20 + 25 − 3

Or you could imagine moving 3 pieces from the 25 pile over to bring the 17 up to 20, so:
17 + 25 = 20 + 22

Or you could move pieces the other direction, taking enough from the 17 pile to bring the 25 up to 30:
17 + 25 = 12 + 30

Or you could add by place value, starting with the bigger chunks:
17 + 25 = 10 + 20 + 7 + 5

Or maybe you notice a fact you already know, that 7 + 5 = 12. Then you can add in the other parts:
17 + 25 = 12 + 10 + 20

Or you could write it in columns and add with carrying. But when you do that, it makes you focus on following rules instead of making sense of the numbers. We want children to always be making sense in math.

4. Skip Around for Variety.

Textbooks make math feel like a ladder to climb, rung by rung, working systematically from one topic to the next. But that’s an illusion. Books have to be written page by page, chapter by chapter, but we don’t have to read them that way.

Look ahead to find a topic your child will enjoy or find relatively easy, like graphs or geometry shapes. Bookmark that section.

Then when you get bogged down in a tough topic like subtraction or long division, you can break it up with the lighter work by doing a few problems here and then a few from there, a page here and a page there.

This is especially useful in upper elementary and middle school math, when the calculations can get really tedious. Don’t get bogged down in the boring parts of math. Balance them with the more interesting stuff like probability or tessellations.

It’s also fine to skip around from one book to another. If a hard topic in your math book has your child stumped, leave it for a week or two. Switch to something completely different, such as Ed Zaccaro’s book Becoming a Problem-Solving Genius.

5. Don’t Drill, Play.

Math games make children enjoy practicing their number skills. And there are some great games for older kids in algebra and geometry, too.

Look for games that emphasize thinking and strategy, not speed. Games that focus on speed tend to discourage the children who need practice the most.

For example, consider the classic game Math War, where each student has a deck of cards and turns them up to do calculations.

• There is a BAD way to play Math War: Each child turns up one card, and they race to say the sum or product. We want to avoid games that depend on speed.

• A BETTER way to play is to have each player turn up two cards and do their own calculations. Weaker players have an equal chance to win.

• But the BEST way to play is for players to draw three or four cards at a time. The player whose turn it is calls the trump (high or low, for which answer will win), and then each player chooses two cards to lay down. Draw to replenish your hand before the next turn.

Can you see how this system transforms a game of speed or pure chance into a truly educational game, one that forces players to think about the math?

Plus, it’s a lot more fun to play when you have choices.