Great Home School
Math Teaching Tips

There are many ways to painlessly teach home school math to your children. Some homeschool math curriculum programs are the abstract, workbook style and others are the more hands-on, creative style. Also, there are several ways to teach using basic items found in the home.

There are many ways to painlessly teach home school math to your children. Some homeschool math curriculum programs are the abstract, workbook style and others are the more hands-on, creative style. Also, there are several ways to teach using basic items found in the home.

Around the House

When you start homeschooling your child, count everything you can get your hands on. Some common items include buttons, pennies, small toys, erasers...you get the idea. You want him to correlate a number with an item.

Have him put groups together and begin to compare which group has more in it. Later, he'll probably see greater than, less than, and equal to examples in his math book.

Continue counting, adding, comparing, and subtracting from these groups to prepare your child for home school math. When dealing with groups of five, teach him to skip count by 5s to prepare for teaching about clocks.

Create a chart or download one from the Internet that shows the colors and shapes. Then, play a game where he has to locate a blue item, a red item, etc. Color a lot with him to reinforce the names of the colors.

He'll have so much fun he won't even realize he's learning!

Math in the Real World

Use every chance to show how you encounter math in everyday living.

For instance, explain to him about our system of taxes. Give your child or let him earn money to buy an item from a Dollar Store. Then, explain why you had to give him the extra change to cover his purchase after tax was added.

Also, while shopping, you could explain percentages to him when an item he's interested in is marked down. This casual, real-life explanation of a concept goes a long way in helping him understand how to find the percentage of a number.

Other things to do would be to estimate how much money he can save by a given date, use a recipe for cookies and calculate the new amounts if they're doubled or tripled, or he could figure out how to divide those cookies evenly among some friends.

Math Projects

A few ideas for simple home school math projects to complete with your child include:

• design and build a birdhouse
• measure bedroom and cut wood for display shelves
• set up a pretend store and print fun "money"
• learn to sew a garment or hem pants
• balance a checkbook, calculate the area of their bedroom or the whole house

What I Use For Math

Math-U-See, Alpha Omega's Horizons Math, Saxon Math Homeschool, and Bob Jones University Press distance learning program. Another resource I love and that has worked well for us is the Christ Centered Curriculum math program. Click to read a homeschool curriculum review.

I strongly recommend the hands-on homeschool math programs that suggest or include manipulatives--small, colorful, objects that students "manipulate" to help solve math problems. Children see and grasp concepts so much easier and math makes more sense to them that way.

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