Mathematics homework! The parents can’t do it; the children can’t always remember the strategy correctly. Tears from the children, screaming from the parents, frustration all round…. Perhaps the biggest problem we have with mathematics homework is that the parents don’t understand how 21st Century learners, the students of today, learn and work through maths problems.
To endeavour to rectify this problem, I have been running classes for the parents before school, taking them back to their school days and teaching them the ‘new’, 21st Century way of teaching and learning. Parents have embraced the sessions quite well, enjoying the light-bulb moments. They now want more.
In a further attempt to draw the parents and wider community in, we have been publishing ‘Maths @ Home bookmarks’ in our school newsletter. Each week there is a ‘bookmark’ on a different topic, outlining a maths concept. Each one includes an explanation of the concept or mathematics term, examples and possible activities parents (or any caregiver) can do with the children to extend or consolidate their skills outside of school.
Now that we have started the printing of ‘Maths @ Home’ into the newsletter, there have been all sorts of requests from parents in prep, wanting ideas to help struggling learners, all the way to year seven parents wanting clarification and understanding of terminology and concepts they haven’t used in twenty years. Parents can now actively help their children with mathematics homework while using the same language teachers at school are using, while making sense of the strategies their children are trying to explain. Maths @ Home has been an all-round winner. The only frustration now is having to wait a whole week to read the next bookmark and hoping it is going to be the topic that they requested.
The ‘Maths @ Home’ topics of choice mainly focus on basic number and mental computation strategies, the building blocks students need to continue progressing through the curriculum and through the year levels. With our newfound school – home – community partnership, it is hoped our students will be able to build a strong foundation of the basics of number from which to build the rest of their education. We all know that learning maths is not a race and no child learns at the same pace as another. Students requiring a little longer on one concept or strategy are able to get additional help and practice at home now there is someone outside school who understands the learning path and can use the same language students hear at school.
As well as printing the ‘Maths @ Home’ bookmarks in the school newsletter, they have been very useful to send home as bookmarks, particularly as a new focus or topic is being taught. For those students struggling, some very basic bookmarks have been written to assist parents with ideas for learning experiences to actively engage their children in activities to help them understand a concept or strategy. The activities on the bookmarks are mostly fun, many can be done in the car, while playing at the park, even while doing the grocery shopping. As educators, we want maths to be fun; we want students to want to do maths, to want to learn. If your students aren’t having fun while learning, something needs to change. It probably means you, as a teacher, aren’t having fun either.
One of the most important messages we need to get across to parents is, through the use of mental computation strategies, the goal is to remove the need to use fingers for counting. If we can remove the strong need to use fingers early on, students will enjoy maths so much more as they move through the curriculum.
Here are some of the ‘Maths @ Home bookmarks’ I have written. Give it a go; write some for your school. Remove the frustration and increase the common mathematics language.
