Aside from pinning him to the desk 😆

Can anyone give a struggling dad some pointers on how to get this little tinker a bit more motivated with maths.

His reading and writing is no problem but maths!!!! If I had hair I’d be tearing it out. I know he’s only 7, but I am concerned about him falling behind (trust me I am not a pushy parent).

The other issues is his younger brother is mirroring him when we try to get him to do maths as well (joy!!).

I’ve bought the character maths exercise books to encourage him but that isn’t working out to great.

Can anyone point me to some “good” resources??

the keystage 1 games on the bbc website are good KS1 maths.

I also found “squeebles” apps on iphone to be handy for times tables , adding etc.

it took my daughter along time to “get” maths, she was well ahead in reading but couldn’t get to grips with maths. at some point in year 5/6 it clicked and she did well in her sats. I wouldn’t worry too much.

Build something with him. Gocart, trebuchet, stocks, whatever… You can work whatever maths you want into that. Maths in isolation is utterly pointless.

I dunno but maybe you can help get mine to work on her reading. She can, she just doesn’t really want to.

I dunno but maybe you can help get mine to work on her reading. She can, she just doesn’t really want to.

😆

We used the power of Lego, most Lego kits have code numbers and it was a case of seeing which ones he wanted, then working out various maths games between us to get to number (think countdown), when he could get to the number by himself happily 3 times we’d buy him the kit. Starting small helps. Of course if he hates Lego then ignore the above 🙂

I found a Star Wars Jedi Maths Skills book worked

As per 5thElefant, use Lego to help with counting, fractions, building cool stuff and how it applies to real things which should help distract him from the maths for math’s sake.

I have the same with my daughter. She will happily read to herself and loves writing notes but maths she struggles with. When we go shopping I ask her to add up prices and work out change, real life maths than she can see has relevance rather than numbers on a page. I’ll be keeping an eye on this thread for some better ideas.

Some good ideas!! Keep them coming.

“If I have 2 slippers, one belt and you have a 10 second head start, how sore are you going to be if you don’t do your homework?”

Aside from pinning him to the desk

Why is maths and numeracy all at a desk?

Take what he has to do and make it interesting….what is he doing at the moment? I presume this is homework, or is it an issue in school as well?

http://www.ltl.org.uk/resources/results.php?pageNum_infoitems=3&totalRows_infoitems=46&txt=&inctype=any&subj=3&rgn=&kwd%5B%5D=5&x=21&y=36

water rockets.

use a car’s foot pump, record the psi vs distance travelled in paces.

graphs is maths…

(if 40psi gets us 20 paces, what psi to launch a rocket to his mate’s house?)

let him see your monthly household budget, if he can see a way to save £50, he can have it.

He knows about Krampus right?

Deny pudding until done.

“Johhny, if you have one pudding and the cost of you not doing your maths homework is one pudding, how many puddings do you have ?”

“Err, one pudding ?”

“Show me your working out.”

https://uk.pinterest.com/explore/lego-math/

Another way to look at it is;
Is it the child or the teacher?
You may be teaching the wrong way causing confusion.

We had both scenarios with daughter. She in turn has had the same issues with both her kids, moving daughter to another school as a consequence.

She is a primary school teacher……. I will ask her for some ideas

Whist (baby bridge even?)
Dominoes

.

sorry.. too drunk resonsibly.. tomorrow I’ll do better

Edit. I have a lot to say, I’m British, wife Chinese… and she’s a Maths teacher.
Maths is important in our household (because I use it daily, and my teacher was sht)

Try nrich.maths, lots of fun activities http://nrich.maths.org/frontpage

Does your school have a contract with any of the learning websites? Our school used education city. Our daughter hated maths at school but when we logged onto her education city account she blitzed all the maths exercises quickly with a bit of help and she quite likes it now

Some great ideas. Lego may be the way forward.

Lots of good ideas but I’d add that a sticker reward chart really works for us. ‘2 pages of your maths book (bought from Amazon, crucially not too hard and we do it together) and you get a sticker’. 50 stickers earnt some 661 gloves.

Don’t get me wrong, it was still often a bit of a fight, but some days he’d be in the mood to sit down and smash out 5 stickers-worth.

Good luck!

Look up 10 Second Maths by Philip Chan. He’s my old high school maths teacher and a genuine game changer in terms of maths teaching. He’s won a ton of awards for his works, I genuinely can’t recommend his methods enough.

on line stuff? – ours loved Mathletics – as said school may already have subscriptions

Okay Maths in general (other than adding up working out margins) is fairly worthless unless you are going to be a maths lecturer or an Engineer (I did a mechanical engineering degree) so don’t sweat it too much with your kids after all when was the last time a grown up used algebra….

Play lego – break the instructions into “we need 16 bits, can you get 4 fours” etc.

Build stuff together, measuring etc.

Teach poker / blackjack, learn currency and numbers!

Board Games. Roll the dice and add them up. Basic mental arithmetics, but that is the foundation to build on

You can then move on to counting the moves on the board and then start (gently) questioning the answers and suggesting tactics based around different numbers (i.e the total was 10, but that could be 9+1, 8+2, 7+3, 6+4 of 5+5)

As the confidence grows you can start picking different games to get more maths involved. We are on Warhammer 40K now and looking at odds, probability, averages etc. I am left in the dark! 😉

He’s 7 years old. It’s the summer holidays.
Why the **** would he be doing Maths?
There’s plenty of time for that in a couple of week’s time.
If he’s struggling in 2 years time it’s a different matter.

Actually drslow has hit another one on the head. “We have four pieces now, how many more do we need?” in a slow ‘thoughtful’ voice whilst thumbing through the stuff all round…..

“Ahh! we have 5 now, that means x-5=y… we only need y now!”

etc

He’s 7 years old. It’s the summer holidays.

Our lot have been back a week, some back a fortnight.

See if you can get mathletics or dbprimary access from the school. Ours love these and it provides a lot of fun extra curricular maths.

try Sumdog.com it works for some….depends on your child….my daughter didnt really get on with it but it seems more geared to boys

At that age my daughter hated arithmetic and couldn’t grasp it at all. Especially division.
Until I started describing the problems using money. The cake was 90p and there are 3 of you. How much do you each have to pay? Little mercenary got it straight away.

Junior maths starts out as a load of mental arithmetic and parrot fashion learning of times tables. Bored me to death and I never learnt it properly even to this day.

Doesn’t stop you doing trig, calculus, differential equations etc. Maths became more interesting to me when it stopped being about doing page after page of tedious sums, and actually doing proper maths. I’m no maths genius but managed to get A level maths and a computer science degree. Software is my job. The maths parts of the job involve understanding maths, but not doing the actual calculations. That’s what computers are for! 😀

On a serious note (instead of my flippant joke earlier) if your child isn’t engaged with maths, just isn’t interested then it’s worth taking deadkenny’s perspective on it. Try looking, briefly, in to some of the more weird and interesting aspects of maths without getting bogged down in the detail. Geometric spirals in nature, the golden ratio, complex numbers, drawing quadratic equations on paper.

I know he’s only 7, but I am concerned about him falling behind

I don’t have any specific advice for you but I will say this.

At 7 years old I was also struggling with Maths, I was also behind* with my reading at that age. I was even a bit crap at maths when I went on to secondary school and for the first year or so there was put a couple of sets down from most of my peers.

But then things changed, the maths became more interesting, the teaching more engaging and I actually started to ‘get it’ a lot more, I wrapped my head around concepts that I had ignored before, not because I couldn’t understand them but because I just wasn’t interested and from then on things took a different turn.

I went on to get straight A’s at GCSE, then did Maths, Further Maths and Physics at A level, and then Physics at Uni and got a Masters too, all involving some of the most horrific maths you’ll ever have the misfortune to encounter, and all from someone who struggled with maths at primary school and shortly after. Obviously your son isn’t me, but he is only 7…

Again, can’t offer any actual advice, but I wouldn’t necessarily worry about the being behind bit of it.

* I’ve since found out that it was mostly due to boredom and the teaching than actually being behind, I had no trouble with language and communication, I just couldn’t be bothered to read the school books because they didn’t interest me, I was a prolific Lego builder and could deal with all the multiples and fractions required to build some awesome stuff even at a young age, but in my head at the time this wasn’t maths, maths was boring sums and stuff.

I’m not a pushy parent by any means (I know he’s 7, but sometimes it’s the basic stuff he isn’t getting). I do care about my kids doing well, so I will try different things to help them. Some great ideas have come from this thread, so thank you 🙂

We have used IXL https://uk.ixl.com/ with good results. You can do a bit each day free of charge or subscribe if you need to do more.