Math Lessons for Kids: Beginner's Math

What Can I Do to Help My Beginning Learner Succeed at Math?

As a parent, you can help your child be successful by providing him or her with engaging learning opportunities. These activities will allow your child to become excited about what he or she is learning, which will greatly boost the chances of success. Additionally, hands-on activities that allow your child to manipulate numbers or shapes visually will likely help math make more sense.

Geometry Booklet

For this activity, you will need several pieces of construction paper, pencils and markers. For each piece of construction paper, ask your child to draw a picture of a specific shape, write the name of the shape and provide several of its characteristics. Join the pages together to make a booklet of the shapes your child has learned about in math class.

This booklet will be a great resource for your child to use while completing homework assignments or reviewing for tests. Creating the booklet is also an interactive way for your child to show you how much he or she knows about shapes. If your child is in lower elementary school, he or she may only know basic shapes, such as squares, circles, rectangles and triangles. If your child is in an upper elementary grade, he or she will probably include shapes like trapezoids, quadrilaterals, rhombuses and parallelograms.

What's Your Number?

Before beginning this activity, label index cards with a variety of numbers and put them in a bowl. If your child is in a lower elementary grade, you may only want to use 1-digit numbers on the cards. However, if your child is in an upper elementary grade, you will probably want to include decimals and 2-digit numbers.

Players will take turns drawing two cards from the bowl and using the cards to create the largest number possible using a math operation, such as addition, subtraction, multiplication or division. The player with the largest number will receive one point. Cards should be returned to the bowl after each round of play. After ten rounds of play, the player with the most points wins the game.