Helping your child to develop numeracy.
Dependent upon our own experiences as children, mathematics can bring about feelings of confidence
or sheer panic. However, mathematics is all around us and is an essential component of everyday life
requiring confidence and application. Our children need to establish sound early mathematical
concepts so that a firm foundation is formed. Once children have these concepts secure in their
understanding they can go on throughout their school lives and beyond into adulthood, building on
and using mathematical skills with confidence.
Mathematics is an abstract discipline but during the early stages, many concepts can be learned
through the use of everyday objects found within the home. Most children enjoy learning but prefer
to find out things for themselves rather than being told by adults. Through constructive play you can
help your child learn the early concepts without them realising it. A clever parent will constantly ask
questions and set challenges for the child to work out the answers by making it a game and fun.
Some difficulties with developing numeracy
· The language is often too complex for children to understand
· Poor memory skills can hinder the learning of techniques such as times tables
· Frequent experiences of failure can make children anxious and discouraged, which makes them fall
behind and lack confidence in the subject.
Why do we need to learn maths?
Adults may think that since leaving school they have not needed any maths but, thinking about day to
day life, maths plays a greater part than might be imagined:
· Every day will involve using a clock to estimate how long it would take to do something
· Driving or pushing a pushchair will require knowledge of space and shape to make sure that spaces
can be fitted through, that speed limits are kept to, to judge distances etc.
· Shopping involves some complex mathematical decisions e.g. Can the trolley fit through this gap?
Can all this shopping be carried home? Is there enough space for it in the cupboards/freezer? Is
it sufficient food for the family’s needs? Is one product better value than another one? Is the
top shelf reachable? Is there enough money to pay for it all? Which checkout will move the
quickest? Which coins are needed to make payment? How much change should be given?
It is important to make maths at home as much fun as possible so that children want to learn. It is
also important to show how we use maths skills in our everyday lives and to involve your child in this.
By identifying and solving problems children learn the early maths skills which provides a secure
foundation for when maths becomes a little more abstract as they grow older. Here are some simple
ideas of how you can help your child in the earliest stages to enjoy maths.
· Number songs and rhymes
· Discuss aspects of numbers that may appear in story books—not just numbers but could be shapes,
space and pattern.
· Cut out numbers from sheets of sandpaper or other tactile material such as velvet, encourage your
child to trace their finger around the numbers correctly, always starting at the top. Bad habits
developed now will be very difficult to break at a later stage so this aspect is very important
· Children can count anything and the sooner that they start the better! Fingers, toes, buttons, pasta,
trees, cars, building bricks, sweets, and apples—encourage them to count things wherever they
are.
· Give them tasks when you are out shopping e.g. put 3 apples in a bag, 2 tins of beans in the trolley
etc.
· Peel an orange, how many segments? Eat one, how many left? Eat half of the segments how many
did you eat?
· Create a numbers scrap book—look for numbers in magazines and papers, cut them out and stick
them on the correct page
· Simple dot-to-dot puzzle books are a great way of remembering number order. Puzzle books are also
good
· Play number games such as playing cards, dominoes, and board games with dice.
· 1:1 correspondence—laying the table for dinner—matching knives, forks, plates, mugs etc. How
many more do we need?
· Encourage children to help sort the laundry: finding pairs of socks, matching patterns and colors
· Look at house numbers as you walk about—are they odd or even? What will be the next number?
· In year 2 children start to learn the 2x, 5x and 10x tables. Foods can be a very motivating way of
learning multiplication and division facts. Counting biscuits in two’s as they are emptied from
the packet into the biscuit tin, from a packet of sweets how many can each of your family
members get?
· Singing multiplication songs
· Practice fractions by cutting sandwiches and pizza into halves and quarters. Is there more than one
way of cutting a sandwich into quarters?
· Creating and looking for repeating patterns in the world around you, looking in magazines etc.,
Recreating the pattern you can see. Creating your own repeating pattern for a border on a card
or picture.
· Play ‘I’m thinking of a number’ game begin by giving clues such as ‘my number is more than 50 but
less than 60, it is an odd number, it is two more than 63, etc. As your child becomes more
confident they can find out by asking questions such as. ‘Is it higher than 50?’ etc.
Telling the Time

 How long does it take to get dressed in the morning?
 Play games like ‘What’s the time Mr. Wolf?’
 Time what you can do in one minute—hop on one leg, stare without blinking, tidy toys away etc.
 Let your child borrow your watch and ask them to tell you when it gets to a specific time.
 Time how long it takes to walk to school, to the shops, to the library etc.
 Setting a timer for activities
 Planning out a daily timetable for a week
 Reading the TV guide and planning family viewing
 How long to cook a meal, run a bath, read a story etc.?
Weighing
· Let your child help you weigh out the ingredients in grams and kilograms for a recipe
· Practice halving and doubling amounts to make less than or more than the recipe suggested
· Checking out the capacities of items such as those needed for cooking, those items in their lunch box
etc.
Money
· Counting money: sort by the different value coins
· Find the biggest coin is it worth the most?
· Find the smallest coin, is it worth the least?
· Place them in order of value
· Use 2p, 5p and 10p coins to support the learning of times tables.
· Playing shops, making price tags for toys, groceries etc, using real money to be the shop keeper. How
much will two items cost? Is 50p enough to cover the cost? How much change would I need
from 50p?
· Counting out change
· Playing monopoly
· Budgeting pocket money
Multiplication
It's important that you can multiply and divide without using a calculator.
1. Example - 4 × 7, which is 28, so write the 8 and carry the 2 to the tens column.
2. 4 × 3 = 12, but remember to add the carried 2 to get 14. Write the 4 and carry the 1
to the hundreds column.
3. 4 × 2 = 8, and we add the carried 1 to get 9.
Therefore 237 × 4 = 948
Looking for shapes in the everyday world—shapes, space and measures
· Looking for objects that are squares, circles, rectangles, cubes etc
· Shape toys, puzzles etc.
Out for a walk:
· How many houses have square windows, round windows etc.
· How many bricks in the garden wall, what pattern are they in, can they copy the pattern?
· Look for symmetry in leaves and flowers, butterflies and insects
Measuring
· How many paces from Point A to Point B
· Measuring furniture and spaces and working out what would fit where.
· Construction kits like Duplo and Lego are good for developing spatial awareness
· Fitting saucepans and bowls into each other in order of size
Rolling out pastry or dough, what happens to it? It gets bigger, longer, and thinner
Capacity
 Plastic shampoo bottles and bath gel bottles of different sizes in the bath —how many little bottles
needed to fill up the big bottle?
 Playing with sand and different shaped containers or rice, or gravel
 How many cups can I fill from this jug of squash?
 Which container holds more?
Working with your child’s school to help develop math’s
 Liaise with the school—find out what the yearly targets are for your child’s numeracy skills. This is
not for you to teach your child but to understand and support what the teacher is trying to do.
 Research shows that parental involvement and interest in activities is possibly more important than
the activities themselves
 Ensure that the work set is at the child’s level, can they explain the problem?
 Use easy words to explain the problem
 Encourage the use of practical equipment e.g. Money, sweets etc. for counting—try to make it
meaningful and less abstract.
 Try to make the learning of number facts fun e.g. Using time’s table’s song CDs etc. however, make
sure that they are relevant to the current work being learned.
 Mental arithmetic—talk about the different ways to get the right answer
 Be diagnostic. Help your child to find their mistakes and praise them for it.
 If concerns arise, discuss these with your child's class teacher.