Math Fact
Practice
One of the best ways to help your 5th grader succeed is to make
sure he or she has mastery of all of his or her math facts. While
flashcards are a traditional and useful method of practicing, there are a lot
of other easy and fast ways to practice. Here are a few tips:
- Spend 5-10 minutes of oral math fact practice in the car, or as you
walk, on the way to all the extracurricular activities you go to.
You don’t always just have to do facts. Try skip counting by a
number and see how high you can get in 5 minutes.
- Use dice, dominoes, and playing cards to mix things up.
- With dice, have the student roll and add or
multiply the numbers. Try more than two die for a challenge.
- Play a round of dominoes and add up each side
or multiply the sides. See who can get a mental sum of all of his
or her dominoes first.
- Using playing cards, play “War: Each
person turns over two cards and multiplies them. Whoever has the larger
product (answer) wins. For a bigger challenge, have each person put
down 4 cards and make two, two-digit numbers to multiply.
- Other board games have GREAT ways to do math, too: make kids
solve Monopoly transactions instead of using the calculator,keep a running
tab of Sorry cards pulled, etc...
- Use everyday math experiences to practice estimating and
calculating with your child.
- Discuss about how much gas will cost as you
are filling up the car.
- Figure out about how much the produce, meat,
or snack part of your grocery bill will be.
- Get help with cooking. Have students
measure out parts of recipes in the liquid measuring cup marked with
fractions. Try to double or halve a recipe together.
- Discuss how much all the gear and fees are
for one sport or activity.
- If you’re building, painting, putting in
tile, or doing any other home projects have your child help measure and
calculate area or perimeter.
- When holidays or birthdays come around, have
kids cut out ads from the paper to calculate present costs.
- Sports are a GREAT opportunity for math! Figure out baseball
stats, find different combinations of regular shots and three-pointers a
player could make to get to a total, how a fantasy football player earned
your team points, or the sum of all the players’ jersey numbers.
- Download the math games we use in class here:
- Find TONS of Investigations math games and resources at this site: http://investigations.terc.edu/families/doing_math/Games_index.cfm
- Download math fact iPad or iPhone apps.
- You can find tons of online math games on the GRE website. Go
to “Student Information” and then “Useful Links”.
MATH IS
EVERYWHERE! Expose your kids to all the ways you use it as often as possible!
