Effective and fun math teaching

It is always fun to start a game in class, especially your offline class. The prospect of game energizes the whole class and you will get added benefit of every kid involved no matter what their age.  Here are some games to try.  Interesting fun fact with number 4. A nice game to play with your students of grade 2 and above.  Ask them to write the biggest number name they know.  For example  One hundred ninety nine. Count how many letters it has. The above number has 20. Ask them to write the number name of 20 and count the letters in it   Twenty. It has six letters. Now six has three letters. Three has five letters. Five has four letters.  Four has four letters. Game ends.  Let us try another number name . Thirty nine.   Count how many letters.  Ten letters. Ten has three letters. Three has five letters. Five has four letters.  Four has four letters.  Game over.  So as you can see, no matter how big the number n...

Teaching Time Time is a concept which is confusing to many children. Here I have tried to reduce the complexity by a story Which relates to the child’s day schedule. If you tell this story every day to your child, she can understand the  concept. The story is here. An interactive version of the story is here in this link https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1RTL6HOn1fFKw1Kd4FHg2fejYCzrLcN9nXRu89IQc560/edit?usp=drivesdk How to make the child understand minutes, hours and days. In this, I used numerous ways with my daughter. The one which worked was the calendar. I made a chart with The current month like this But I put a grid to write the dates.Then I wrote all the weekdays in different colours.   Calendar concept  Make your child mark the date , the month and the year in every activity you do. Soon they will be knowing how to refer the calendar and get these. Now after these, introduce concepts like...

Mental math is a group of skills that allow people to do math “in their head” without using pencil and paper or a calculator. Mental math is useful in school and in everyday life. Mental math can help kids understand math concepts better and get to the answer faster. Mental math is useful in everyday life to answer questions like: What is the sale price for this item? Do I have enough cash to buy everything in my cart? Am I getting the correct amount of change from the cashier? When should I leave in order to arrive on time? Doing mental math requires strong memory skills. Math facts and other number concepts have to be retrieved from long-term memory. Our brains also use a skill called working memory to keep track of the steps needed to solve a particular math problem. When kids struggle with mental math, it doesn’t mean they’re not smart. Kids develop math skills at their own pace. Difficulty with mental math could be a matter of needing more time and practice to “catch up." T...

How to start math for UKG and grade 1. You should be ready to engage these kids every 20 minutes in the online class with different activities. Plan ahead on the activities. You can plan to do one activity per class for grade 1. You should plan to do one broadcast call to engage the children. It is preferable to combine your first grader with one or two higher grade students for multiple batches.   The kids are generally playful so it is difficult to engage them for more than 30 minutes at a time with the worksheets. The class can be tailored to have 20 min of worksheets, then whiteboard activity, then go back to worksheets. Try to identify each kid’s natural interests. Apart from cuemath hours, try to incorporate games  with a zoom call once a month. Plan an event once a month over zoom with some math riddles or instant quiz. Try some new ideas to teach concepts using the whiteboard and Cueing. The easiest chapters for first graders are shapes and patterns and measurement.So ...

It is a difficult task to introduce multiplication to younger kids. Over the years I have found that some methods work better than others.  Let us go back to the hundred chart once again. If you remember the hundred chart, we can use it to skip count early multiplication tables. So in this  way, we can do skip count by 2, 5 and 10 first. If the child catches the pattern, you can go upto 20 on skip by 2.  After that make him or her understand that through finger counting. For example, 2 x 1 = 2, Use the pinky finger to say 2, then ring finger to say 4 etc. Writing in a book.  Then comes writing it in a book. Each time let the child count forward skipping by 2 and write that down in a book.  5 tables  Now you know the pattern. Count again in fingers through 5, 10, 15 etc. You can show  how to write through 5 counting numbers, you can fill some numbers and make the student fill the rest. There are so many innovative ways to think. 10 tables Sa...

   implementation The ability to think mathematically and to use mathematical thinking to solve problems is an important goal of schooling.  An ideal teacher of mathematics showing ideas for reaching her students’ full potential. She would have the following tasks ahead of her. The teacher should select an open and reversed task to encourage investigation and mathematical thinking. This means that the teacher should try to understand what the child knows about the concept with a series of how and why questions. List the process in a flow chart on the board. The teacher should start from what the student knows already. For example,  if the student knows addition, she should base her cueing on subtraction on the student's addition skills. Likewise division should be connected to multiplication. In solving creative reasoning exercises, the teacher should guide the children from what they might know already.To the child who has understood the puzzle, she may even ask a f...