Maths in the Car
If you spend some time with your child in the car, there are lots of opportunities to teach/use maths and see it in the world around you. It really builds their mental maths skills and the relationship between what they learn and what they see in the world.
- Numbers on homes and commercial buildings (when read promote naming of numbers to hundreds).
- Time on signs.
- Numbers on buses and car number plates (naming numbers to hundreds). You can play a game where you spot all cars with a particular number in their number plate (eg 38).
- Counting practice: forwards and backwards by ones, twos, fives, tens, hundreds. You can even do by 15s or 20s. You can do odd and even numbers and friends of ten (and then extend that to 12 + 8, 46 + 4 etc). This can lead into multiplication and division (eg if you can count by 10s, four 10s is? Four twenties is? So what is 80 ÷ 20 = ?) This can also link to fractions (what is a quarter of 80?)
- After a while you can add mental addition of two or three numbers (what’s 10 plus 10? What’s 5 plus 5 plus 10?) And you can even do a bit of algebra (if two times x is 20, what’s x?)
- Talk about what strategies they use, and use that. If for example they count by 15s by adding a ten then five ones or a five, that can lead to them adding two 2 digit numbers mentally (avoid need for trading/carrying, at least at first).
Make it fun!