Math Help: Easy Tips to Help with Math

Simple tricks to help your child with math

Throughout his education, your child will take many math classes. Learning math, for some children can be difficult and intimidating. Playing math games and activities with your child helps to incorporate math in daily life and make it less intimidating. He will begin to see that math can be fun and that it will become more important later in life.

Help with Math Word Problems

Word problems often cause children a great deal of anxiety. With most word problems, however, the student is asked to solve for an unknown. Teach your child to first determine what the unknown variable is for his problem. Have him begin to list the unknown variable as “x”, then ask him to take the known variables and write them down alongside the unknown x. He will find that, when he rereads the question after determining these known variables and the unknown, he ends up with a simple algebraic equation that he can easily solve.

Math Help with Mnemonic Devices

There are also several mnemonic devices that you can teach your child to help make math easier. A helpful one to know about is, “Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally”, if your child remembers this phrase, he will always remember the algebraic order (PEMDAS) of operations. Please=Parenthesis, so if the problem he is solving has something in parenthesis, he will do this first. Then, Excuse=Exponents, My=Multiplication, Dear=Division, Aunt=Addition, and Sally=Subtraction. Your child will learn to perform these tasks in this order.

Such a device comes in handy when your child begins algebra because when a child sees a problem like, 6-5x7, he will naturally assume that he is to read and solve the problem from left to right since this is how we read. If he approaches math in this way, however, he will most often get the wrong answer, in this case, 7. But if he follows the PEMDAS method that you teach him, he will come up with the correct answer, -29.

There are many other tricks that can help make math fun and less intimidating for your child. They will make math less of a chore and easier to learn. These simple tricks will teach him the basics, which he will use throughout his education and beyond.

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