Children naturally love counting and doing puzzles, but for some reason, when you call it "math", all of the interest flies out the window! So how can you cater to this natural love of 'math' and keep it fun and interesting enough to keep children's interest?!
1) Use things around the house that they already know and love!
My son has a HUGE adoration for his Thomas Trains... he can tell you every single trains name, number and color. When we started working on recognizing numbers and colors, I tried to use posters, games, workbooks, etc that would help him learn to recognize them... all to no avail! One day, we were playing with his trains, and HE asked me what number one of the trains was. Bells went off in my head and I realized that I could cater his natural curiosity about his beloved trains, and still be 'teaching' him to recognize numbers at the same time!
The same general idea worked when it came to my son's Lego's! It was a great way to work on patterns and following directions! I would draw a pattern on paper for him to copy and recreate with his Legos. It not only helped with his color recognition, but his problem solving skills, fine motor skills and he didn't even know he was doing math!!
2) Go Shopping!
You can cater this to all different ages. For young children, you can do a 'mock shop' and let them pretend to go shopping in a pretend store (your kitchen). Label certain items with easy to read prices and print some pretend money for them to shop with! For older children, you can let them help you in the actual grocery store with a specific shopping list. You can even set specific spending limits and give a specific amount of items and let them determine what they can afford, etc.
3) Go on a counting scavenger hunt!
For young children, you can keep the hunt simple and indoors, go on a hunt and count how many bedrooms, windows, doors, bathrooms, etc are in your house. For older children, you can even take this adventure outside. Look for certain kinds of animals, plants, flowers, you name it! Add in another element of fun (for any age) and create a graph for them to track their finds!
4) Get in the Kitchen!
I was very hesitant for a while with my son when it came to the kitchen. I worried about the GIANT mess that would be left when he was done "helping". You don't even have to take on the entire project with them! You can start small and let your child help with measuring certain ingredients. You can modify the difficulty of the 'lesson' by talking about the different kinds of measuring cups and seeing what other measurements can also add up to equal one cup, etc.
5) Sort it out!
The sky is the limit when it comes to finding things to sort! Candy, beans, cotton balls, paper clips... you name it! You can even change around how you want it sorted... one time, sort by color, the next time sort by size or shape! My son had a BLAST when I pulled his Matchbox cars to the school table and we sorted them by color! For younger children, you can make it easier by having 'color cards' and have them match the specific objects to the correct card. Older children can just be told to sort out the items by color, shape, etc.
There are SO many great ways to see math in the every day! Take a look around your house and even your neighborhood, and I think you will be surprised with all the different ways you can introduce math to your kids without using boring worksheets and time tables! Pretty soon, your kids will start finding the math themselves!
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