Basic Math Supports

Stick with the Basics

Remember, this is likely a short term situation and your child is going to go back to school at some point.  Our purpose during this time in my opinion is to keep them learning and using their brains so they continue to develop.  So, stick to the basics.  

Math wise, the basics would included some of the more obvious concepts that we all use everyday.  Obviously we want to spend time working with the four main operations, adding and subtracting, as well as multiplying and dividing. Depending upon the age of your children this might be all you need to worry about.  

Beyond that, clear up to middle school aged students we see a need for things like working with fractions, percentages, and decimals.  Doing some work with integers (negative numbers) is also beneficial.  Money math, ratios, and basic geometry (perimeter and area) would all be good to consider.  As well as basic algebra if your children are older.  

I will give you a couple quick and easy resources to help with all this.  The first addresses the teaching of various topics, and the second will give you ample access to practice work.  

For the teaching and learning of basic math concepts I love the work that has been done over at Khan Academy.  I am not going to get into the full run down of their site and what it offers in this post, you can likely find a pile of review videos and articles online with a quick search.  What is important about Khan is that they offer specific example videos of various topics.  For example how to find a percentage.... Khan (Finding Percent of a Number) They have tons of short quick video's just like the one at that link. If your child is working on a math topic you don't quite understand, Khan likely has a video explaining it. 

The second resource I will give you is www.math-drills.com.  On this site you will find a pile of ready made worksheets covering a wide range of topics.  Simply print them off and hand them to your child to complete.  If you don't have a printer, just pull it up on the screen and use it like a textbook, having them copy the problem before solving it.  

Beyond these two resources, your district may have access to online based learning platforms that your child has access to at home.  We are using the iReady program here at home that my daughters use at school. This is a great way to use part of that math time, especially since they are used to the platform and it is presenting them topics at their level.  These resources can be a great guide for what you could be supplementing their math time with.  If they are doing percentages in iReady, then maybe find some percentage sheets on Math-Drills.com. 

Finally, if you happen to have access to them, there are a wide range of great workbooks on the market that would offer your child a paper based practice opportunity.  We use these types of workbooks with our girls as we had them laying around from summer work that we try and do with the girls each year.  If you have access to something like this they are generally a great resource.  

What resources do you use?  Comment down below and help us grow the resource list that we will be updating here on this blog.  Lets build this together so we all have access to one, quick stop for lots of great resources!