NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS AND THE FOUR ASPECTS OF MATHS WELLNESS

A new year is right around the corner with an opportunity to start fresh. So we have a few suggestions that can help you and your child navigate the next 365 days for overall “maths wellness” and success.

Making great choices for your child’s maths learning does not only entail building strong study habits but also fostering an environment that inspires a love and curiosity about maths. In this post, you will find suggestions for new year’s resolutions focused on building and strengthening the emotional, social, physical, mental, and financial aspects of a maths learner. You may find that you have considered some of these before but perhaps did not know how to begin. Our suggestions contain examples to help you and your child get started right away!

1: Emotional

January is the fifth month of this school year. How is your child feeling about their grade-level maths so far? Now is a great time to explore their outlook with fresh eyes and make necessary adjustments.

Maths presents parents with the opportunity to build emotional-learning skills for their children, including identifying and managing their emotions, recognizing sources of stress, coping with challenges, maintaining positive motivation and perseverance, and developing self-awareness. Growing children require emotional guidance, and you can help your child manage their emotions when maths seems too difficult, too boring, or even too easy. If anxiety has been a normal part of your child’s maths discussions, consider how you can change that in 2022. Inspiring or even maintaining a love of maths will mean incorporating a healthy mix of challenges.

Consider some of these strategies:

1. If maths has often been hard and challenging, help your child identify one good thing about their maths experience so far. With every challenge, there is growth.

2. Incorporate a “feelings chart” or “feelings thermometer” into your child’s maths work.

3. Allow your child to sit with their emotions and to reach out for support.

4. Relieve stress through physical activities, including physical maths walks.

5. Reframe negative thoughts about maths by making a pros and cons list of the facts.

6. Inspire self-compassion by helping your child acknowledge when they have worked hard, tried their best, and been brave.

7. Register your child for a maths competition.

Remember that strong emotional-learning skills will lead to successful academic performance in all subject areas and will build a healthy member of society.

2: Social

This new year, incorporate more “maths talk” into your child’s life.

Maths understanding deepens when we share our learnings and “families are perfectly situated to talk about quantity, counting, and shapes anywhere children and families are — at home, in the park, or in the supermarket.” Encourage your child to speak to someone else about the math they have learned, be it through a math lesson or informal sharing around the dinner table. Your child can take this a step further and challenge themselves to help someone who has a maths question.

If your child is already attending sessions at Mathnasium, have them invite a friend to the next Maths Night or game night. Maths games are collaborative opportunities to practice fundamental number concepts, strategy, and logic.

3: Physical

To complement the social maths-wellness aspect, exploring math through physical exercise can provide another opportunity to share learnings. Consider taking your child on weekly maths walks to discover the mathematics that exist in everything around us: in the park, the community, the shopping centre, the library, and more! You can customise your maths walks to be spontaneous trips, or planned events that include trail maps and guide points where mathematical problems are presented.

Example tasks for your next maths walk can include:

1. Investigating floor patterns.

2. Exploring the shapes of street signs.

3. Studying bus schedules.

4. Estimating the height of a tree.

5. Counting the number of windows on a building.

4: Mental

The foundation of maths is number sense. This ability cannot be replaced by calculators or computers — it requires exercising “maths muscles.” One of the best ways to do this is to practice mental maths. Encourage your child to solve maths problems in their head, without writing them down. Have them start with simple computations and work their way up to complex problems. Your child’s confidence will grow when they realize they can not only solve maths problems all in their head, but they can do so a lot more efficiently and quickly than relying on traditional algorithms. Some recommended exercises are:

1. 99 + 99 +99 = ___

2. 99 x 7 = ___

3. 667 - 99 = ___

4. 12% of 25 = ___

5. Half of 31 = ___

6. 9 ÷ 11⁄2 = ___

7. What number is halfway between 3 and 21? ___

8. Count by 75s: 0, 75, ___, ___, ___, ___, ___, ___, 600, ___, ___, ___, 900.