Use Your Strengths
You might be good at cooking, or sport, or music, or English. You can use that strength as a source of motivation for you when teaching kids maths.
For example, if physical activity is your area of interest you can time fitness activities, measure ball throwing lengths, take pulses, use stop watches (all of which involve at least number, measurement and working mathematically – but you can graph the results too).
If you’re good at music, you can look at fractions in terms of note values.
If you like English, you can write story books with a maths flavour, like “How fast can I run”, or “What is big”. This can help to make maths more relevant, connected and fun.
Most ideas can be adjusted to any grade level by using more demanding maths concepts - like “How big…” using measurements in decimal notation, or timing sport in fractions of seconds as you would at an athletics carnival, and at the upper end, merging into concepts like speed (both in terms of sport as in distance divided by time and in music as in metronome).
If you have travelled, you can use time zones, weather patterns and exchange rates to make things more interesting. I once ran a class reward “shop” with goods priced in Euro dollars, when student rewards were given in Australian dollars. You can talk about how in some countries, different units of measurements are used, like quarts and gallons, feet and inches, pounds and tons.
