How to Raise Kids Who Love Math

Help your kids not only understand math better but actually LOVE math. Give them the foundation to be super successful in STEM classes and beyond to the real world outside of school.

A boy in a chef's hat cutting peaches in the kitchen

I am the only child “language arts” offspring of two math teachers… so math frustrations were high for all of us. Me because I didn’t understand and them because they didn’t know why I didn’t understand. That all ended in college when I took a “Math for Educators” class. Suddenly it all made sense. At least more sense. Let’s do that for your kids!

Making Math Come Alive

A recent survey showed a whopping 93% of the people said they had very negative responses to math. How can this be? Kids who loved counting their moves on a board game and were very aware of who got the bigger piece of the cookie now are uncomfortable with math?

Could it be that math for them is no longer connected to the real world? Now, for them, it’s just isolated math facts, formulas and memorization. Here are some fun ways to help your kids reconnect with and love math.

Boy at a wooden table with chess board set up to play

Finding the Math in What Your Child Already Loves

Our daughter has always been a planner so, when she was eight, we would make up long word problems for her around a royal banquet theme. We set the number of guests and then she would tell us how many tables, cutlery and pieces of china and stemware the queen would need to have brought from the royal storeroom! (Division and multiplication)

Does your child like to cook? Lots of math there! How about a sports fan? Statistics, ratios, averages! You have a musician? Great! Rhythm and music theory are full of math relationships. And when that musician starts getting paid, then money is also part of the “equation”.

Math in the Kitchen

I’m a big fan of kids doing math in the kitchen. Double, triple or half that cookie recipe. Count the biscuits as they cut them. Cut things in half or quarter. Do we cut the pizza into sixths or eighths? There are 17 guests for the birthday party… how do we divide the cake?

Measure ingredients. Make shopping lists with a budget. Figure the cost for a special dinner or party. Math can have some yummy rewards!

Math in the Shop or Craft Room.

There is so much math to be found here! Estimating the supplies needed, the time it will take, reading (or creating) patterns, measuring, use of shapes, categorizing, 3 dimensional thinking and planning. What is the thing that will motivate your child here?

One of our sons was intrigued with RC cars and planes and the other with creating stuff with electronic guts. You may soon find the math actually gets ahead of you. That’s all right. Seek outside help from those with the same interest and reinforce a growth mindset. You don’t have to know everything.

Math as We Travel

I miss the days of traveling with real paper maps. I do love my GPS, but paper maps had the mileage between points, in incredibly tiny print, so you could add the miles to your next stop, subtract from the whole trip length, deal with scale.

I remember how shocked I was to find out how quickly we got places once we left Texas. Why…in other states people could drive across multiple states in one day! GPS figures all that out for you, but you can still play mileage marker games with your kiddos.

Speed and distance calculations can be a fun part of your trip. How many miles to Disney? How long will that take? What if you were in a covered wagon only able to go 30 miles a day?

Math in the Marketplace

If you have a budding entrepreneur this is the perfect place to practice budgeting, saving, interest, how money is fungible, profit and assets vs debits. They can learn all that while they are selling services (like lawn mowing), lemonade, fresh eggs, or perhaps something they’ve made.

Remember counting money and making change (an important skill endangered by technology) teach and reinforce skip counting.

Math in Our Imagination

Just like the royal banquet I mentioned earlier, a child’s imagination is a great place to think about math. How fast would a spaceship need to go to get to Centauri in # of years, how how many fuzzblatts tall is your alien planet’s capitol building? How many fuzzblatts are in a blingle?

Can you convert fuzzblatts and blingles into Imperial measurements? Or metric? What happens if in your imagination the people have 7 fingers on each hand? What do the extra number look like? What does 10 mean then? (A fun way to introduce base number systems)

Grid game with hand written numbers, clear markers and a pair of dice.

Math as a Game

There are roughly a zillion games on the market, plus the ones we invent, that help kids with math skills either directly or indirectly. Even games like Candy Land can up leveled up with the addition of a set of blank dice. For example, if each side has a multiple of 10 written on it you can have the kids count by 2’s, 5’s or 10’s to make their move.

Or put simple equations on each side and move according to the answer. How about the number words? You’re going to want to get a set or two because they because they have so many educational uses!