If this past June’s report card didn’t look as good as you had wished, you can help your child maintain math and language skills over the summer.

     You can help your child learn by involving him/her is real-life hands on learning at home.

     The first way you can help your child is to have the two of you do some cooking or baking.  Cookbooks and measuring cups provide a good opportunity for learning fractions.  Cookbooks have the measurements and the measuring cups are good hands on tools, often labeled with the fractions.  Your child will be able to see that 1 cup is greater than 1/2, which is greater than 1/3 and so on.  You can teach your child how to add fractions by adding the contents in the measuring cups.

     Food shopping is another great way to learn math skills.  When you take your child to the supermarket, you can look at food prices and compare them.  This strategy of comparing decimals and whole numbers is an important math skill.  After you have paid for your groceries, you can have your younger child categorize the foods on the bill.  Your older child can round the decimal prices to whole numbers (e.g. %7.89 could be rounded to $8.00) to see if the food bill was correct.  This can also be done after dinner at the restaurant.

     Instead of throwing away all those flyers (and perhaps sometimes coupons), you can use them to show your child how to compare prices and determine which flyer has a better sale.  Again, this skill requires estimating, rounding, and adding.

     Board games are great educational tools.  Boggle and Scrabble are two great choices.  Scrabble is an obvious winner with regards to learning spelling and vocabulary.  Allow your child to use a dictionary.  This will help him/her improve vocabulary, learn correct spelling, learn how to use a dictionary, and boost his/her confidence.  I let my kids use a thesaurus and if they can come up with a synonym I give them extra points.

     You can also take out a deck of cards to teach math.  War is a great game to play with young children.  Take out the face cards and have your child determine who wins each round.  This will force your child to look at the two cards and compare the numbers.

  Finally, are you planning on doing any renovations around the house?  If so, measuring tapes are excellent tools for learning math skills.  Your child can measure length using fractions (e.g. 5 ⅜) and whole numbers.  You can also teach your child how to find the perimeter or area of a specific space.

  There are many more ways that you can prevent your child from losing math skills over the summer if you are creative.  It is well known that the best learning is done when it applies to real life.

admin Homeschooling decimals, fractions, learning, spelling, summer

     What a day!  I woke up this morning and headed downtown to Breakfast Television.  They were all unbelievably kind and supportive down there. 

    Dina Pugliese, the host of the show, was terrific!  She kept the conversation fluid and informative.  She is excellent at what she does.  During commercials, she asked me questions, gave me her personal experiences, and prepared me for the upcoming conversation.

    I went on the show to talk about the 3^rd term report cards and give some tips for parents to help their children learn at home.  Dina had a good understanding of the report card process and more than that, she was empathetic to students who have difficulties come September.  I think I gave some good information this morning.  I remember saying that, “The June report card is important because it is an indication of problem areas that should be addressed immediately when school starts,” (We’ll maybe I didn’t say it in exactly those words but I think that’s the message I conveyed).

     I also gave parents practical tips to help their children learn math and language over the summer without spending much money.  I discussed how parents can use shopping bills to teach their children categorizing, addition with decimals, and estimating.  I also mentioned how children can learn vocabulary and spelling by playing scrabble.  I think the producer liked my idea of having children use a tape measure to learn fractions, perimeter, and area.  There was also mention about cookbooks (for procedure writing and following directions), measuring cups (for fractions), and travel brochures for reading and research.

     It was a good experience.  I plan to have the video of my segment up on my media page sometime in July.

    I’m heading uptown this afternoon to give a similar talk on CFRB 1010.

admin In the Media breakfast television, decimals, fractions, measurement, Reading, vocabulary