Helping your child with maths doesn’t need to involve sitting down with a worksheet or a times table chart. Leaving some common household items out to be explored can support children’s mathematical understanding in a practical and playful way. They can also generate so much fun that your child won’t even realise they’re learning! Just as importantly, they can help children make the connection between the maths they learn in school and their everyday lives.
Inspired by all the lovely photos we see posted by families enjoying learning on our platform, we thought we’d share some ideas of things you can do with bits and bobs found around the house…
1. Tape measure
We love it when schools set measuring activities. The activity feed fills up with children cheerfully measuring EVERYTHING – the sofa, the room, the baby . . the dog! There is clearly great satisfaction for a child in unrolling a tape measure and finding out how long something is. A really long, snap back, tape measure appeals to a child’s desire to go ever bigger and further. Families who only managed to rustle up a tiny ruler upload photos of the hilarious antics involved in using it to measure the garden.
Amongst the fun is a lot of mathematics – accurate measuring skills, a sense of how much bigger a meter is than a centimeter, reading numbers, solving problems (How do I measure something that isn’t straight?), making decisions (Should we include the dogs tail?) and discussing the feet and inches on the ‘other’ side of the scale. Another lovely element of using a tape measure is the need for collaboration – it’s hard to measure a room by yourself – so other family members are drawn into the task.
2. Measuring jug
Children love playing with water – at the sink, in the bath, in the garden. Adding a measuring jug takes this play in a more mathematical direction. From measuring how much water will fit in a favourite cup to competing to estimate the capacity of the washing up bowl, there is much to be explored and learnt. The maths includes the skill of reading a scale, recognising how much a litre or a millilitre is, noticing how the same amount of water looks different in different containers, estimating, comparing, visualising. One of our most popular activities is making up a recipe for a drink and measuring the ingredients out. Smoothie anyone?
3. Analogue clock... or stopwatch!
Telling the time is a complex business – there are two (or even three) hands on an analogue clock working on different scales. There are halves and quarters and multiples of five. There are 60 minutes in an hour but variously 12 or 24 hours in a day. Having an analogue clock in the house which is easy to look at and refer to makes the learning process much easier. Whether it’s challenging everyone to be the first to shout a code word whenever they see an o’clock time or racing to tidy up a room before the minute hand makes it to the 6. Learning to tell the time is definitely best done little and often with a dose of fun.
Related to this, there are lots of games to play with a stopwatch. (Infinitely more relaxing with a cheap, child-friendly one rather than one built into your expensive phone!) You can time how long it takes to do something or time how many of something you can do in a minute. Take it to the park and it’ll get everyone running around. When you’re ready to get your breath back, see who can close their eyes and estimate most accurately when a minute is up.
4. Jar of coins
A jam jar full of loose change can be an exciting resource for a generation of children who are more familiar with apple pay than cash. You can sort them, match them and count them. You can spot as many differences as you can between two coins, look for unusual ones or identify a mystery coin in a bag by touch. You can get artistic – making a coin caterpillar or snowman and adding details with pens or you can create coin rubbings with crayons. You can play strategy games – take it in turns to place a coin on a square board – whoever completes a line that makes a pound wins. Setting up a play shop is always a hit – with younger children price items at one coin and then move onto prices that need two coins, like 12p, and then start asking for change. As well as the counting and adding skills involved, children are starting to build an understanding of money itself.
5. Weighing Scales
Like the tape measure and the jug, a weighing scale is intrinsically interesting. If you can find one of the old-fashioned balance scales that come with a set of weights, that’s even better. Charity shops often have them and they can really help children understand what a gram or a kilogram feels like. They also lend themselves to informal comparisons – how many pegs weigh the same as my teddy? There is also a lot you can do with a digital scale – guessing which item is heavier and checking, estimating how much pasta is left in the packet and then weighing it.
Finally, once the scales are out, you may as well do some baking!
All of these activities showcase an everyday, informal use of maths. They are practical and often based on estimates and approximates but represent how maths is actually used in the world beyond school. These experiences build up a sense of number, of units, or of time that will serve children for a lifetime and help them make sense of these concepts when they meet them at school.
Jo Boaler coined the term ‘Math-ish’ in her book of the same name to describe this type of thinking and argues it has enormous value in nurturing connected, flexible knowledge.
We hope you enjoy trying some of them out at home!
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