(StatePoint) Mathematics can feel intimidating to a lot of students, but by making it a part of your child’s daily life, they can have fun with the subject, while beefing up their skills for STEM learning in the classroom. Here are five ways to incorporate math into errands, chores and hobbies:
1. At the store: Involve your child in the process of shopping and making home purchases. Let them use their skills in areas such as arithmetic, percentages and fractions, to help you find the best deals, and to estimate what the total cost of your cart will be at checkout. This is also a good opportunity to talk budgeting and money management.
2. At the game: Make math fun at the stadium or arena. Whether your child is an athlete, a fan, or both, sports can be an excellent way to bring probability, averages and statistics into everyday conversation, along with more advanced STEM concepts, like kinematics. To better understand the performance of a particular team or athlete, kids can crunch numbers and visualize data with graphs and charts.
3. In the kitchen: Whipping up dinner for the family? Baking a batch of cookies for the school fundraiser? Have your child measure and weigh the recipe’s ingredients, convert from metric to English measurements, if needed, and set the oven timer and temperature. Like many household tasks, food preparation inherently involves numbers and mathematics. The best part? You’ll also be encouraging the development of a practical life skill.
4. While driving: Calculating fuel prices and efficiency, along with estimated times of arrival, all involve basic math skills, and can be honed while on the road. More advanced concepts, such as torque, aerodynamics, and kinetic, electrical and thermal energy, can also be applied to driving and road trips. But you don’t have to be in motion to find a relationship between cars and math. Many of these same mathematical concepts can be addressed while performing automotive maintenance.
5. On-the-go: Of course, for on-the-go math learning, and for the classroom, your child should be equipped with gear that makes learning fun and intuitive. The natural textbook display functionality of a graphing calculator, like the fx-9750GIII from Casio, makes graph plotting, probability distribution, vector arithmetic and spreadsheets a highly visual experience, whether kids are calculating their NFL team’s probability of making it to the big game, or the air resistance of an SUV. Plus, the calculator is capable of programming in CASIO Basic and MicroPython, so that kids can put the T into STEM learning, anytime, anywhere.
For many reasons, kids are not always excited about math class. Maybe it’s because the subject feels dry, or maybe it just feels too challenging. Making connections between math and the real world can be a game changer though, introducing the subject as a fun and engaging way of understanding the world.
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