• How can we help at home? 

    Families can do activities at home to help spread the love of math and increase our math understanding! Check out these activities to see what you can incorporate!

  • Kindergarten

    • Have them count to 100 out loud.
    • Count while touching and moving items from 1-20.
    • Skip count by 10s to 100.
    • Play counting games like Candyland and Chutes and Ladders. 
    • Add and Subtract goldfish crackers within 5.
    • Have them add and subtract within 10. 
    • Start with 6 items and ask, "How many more do I need to make 10?" Then start with 10 and ask, "How many will be left if you eat 3?"
    • Play "I SPY..." with shapes. 
    • Sort items by similarities and differences.
    • Have them compare items using vocabulary like taller, longer, shorter, and heavier.

    1st Grade

    • Play GO FISH but search for ways to make 10, like 6 and 4 or 3 and 7 instead of finding matches.
    • Draw two cards or roll two dice and add. Try with 3 or 4 cards! Keep a running total to see who can get to 100 first.
    • Roll dice or draw cards: add to find the cum, compare, or find the difference. 
    • Count and organize items! How many tens and ones? 
    • Count pennies by ones and count dimes by tens.
    • Compare two items. Which one is longer? Shorter?
    • Tell time to the hour and half hour.
    • Play "I SPY..." with rectangles, squares, trapezoids, half-circles/quarter-circles, cubes, rectangular prisms, cones, and cylinders. 
    • Divide a sandwich into halves and fourths.

    2nd Grade

    • Draw two cards or roll two dice and add. Try with 3 or 4 cards! Keep a running total to see who can get to 100 first.
    • Organize items in equal rows. How many in each row? How many rows? How many items in all? Is there another way to organize? 
    • Play any game and tally your scores. Who won? By how many?
    • Count within 1,000 by 1s, 5s, 10s, and 100s, Start on zero or on a random number!
    • Ask "how many" ones, tens, and hundreds in sets of objects. 
    • Measure the length of a table and a shoe. Discuss which tool is best for each job. 
    • Measure the height of everyone in your house. Create a graph of the heights you recorded.
  • 4th-6th

    1.) Gardening
    Gardening is a great opportunity to teach your children math in an interesting way. They can measure the area
    of your garden. From picking seeds together, to measuring the space between the plants and the amount of
    soil required for potting plants.
    2.) Shopping for Value
    Turn the grocery shopping trip into a fun game. Let your child look for offers and then calculate the savings from each shopping trip. Older kids can also help calculate the cost of the food items per pound or ounce.
    3.) Sports Time on TV
    If your kids love to watch sports on TV, you can easily improve their mathematical skills and make their sports watching sessions more exciting. You can begin with teaching them how to keep score, count innings, strikeouts, etc.
    4.) Collections
    A majority of children love collecting coins, stamps, shells and a whole lot of other things. If your child loves collecting shells, he or she can collect a certain number of a single type of shell, or can sort the collection according to size, shape etc.
    5.) Daily Chores
    Daily chores include activities such as folding clothes, sorting them for washing, setting the dinner table. You can teach your child measuring, sorting and counting through the simple task of doing laundry. Children can help sort clothes, measure the amount of detergent that needs to be added and count the
    clothes before putting them in the machine.

  • 3rd Grade

    • Lots of items you buy are arranged in rectangular arrays (rows and columns).
    • Ask you child questions like, "If we buy 3 cartons of eggs, how many eggs will we have?"
    • When making sandwiches, ask your child to cut them into halves and fourths. What happens to the size of pieces as they are dividing them into a greaters number of pieces? 
    • How many Cheez-Itz would it take to cover the front of the box? How many Cheez-Itz tall is the box? How could we figure out how many Cheez-Itz we would need to cover the front of the box without actually having to do it?
    • Play "I SPY..." with shapes.

    4th Grade

    • Your family is having a party and needs 96 sodas for guests. How many packs of 6 sodas will you need to buy at the store? 
    • Take advantage of any natural opportunities to use fractions as they arise. Would you rather eat a 1/4 piece of pizza or two of the 1/8 pieces? Why? 
    • You are baking brownies. The recipe calls for 1/4 cup of oil. How many oil will we need if we are going to triple the recipe? 
    • Look for triangles and quadrilaterals!
    • Notice, name, and discuss symmetry. What makes it symmetrical? 

    5th Grade

    • Ask your child to give you estimated solutions. Can they estimate the cost of 5 grocery items? 
    • Support your child while learning division with larger numbers. If you have 750 minutes on your phone each week and you use 100 minutes a day, will you have enough minutes for the week? 
    • Fill one measuring cup with 2/3 cup water and give your child another measuring cup with 3 3/4 water. How much water do we have in all? 
    • Bake brownies. Have your child find 3/4 of the pan. After some have been eaten, what fraction is left?
    • Find volume of different items! Compare the volumes.

    6th Grade

    • Make a table with your child to show the speed of a car in miles per hour.
    • If a 6-pack of canned drinks cost $3.00, how much does one can cost?
    • While at a store, discuss sales tax. While at a restaurant, discuss tipping. 
    • If you have 2.5 lbs of hamburger meat and your burgers are 1/4 lb each, how many burgers will you be able to make? 
    • Watch Jeopardy! together. What happens when they get the answer right vs. wrong. Relate these to positive and negative numbers. 
    • Have your student conduct a survey/poll for something like their favorite food. Create a graph to represent the data. 
    • Determine the mean, median, and mode of your math grades. 
    • Measure something like a cereal box to find it's volume. Then cut the edges of the box to flatten it and find the surface area of the net.