How Parents Can Supplement Children's Learning at Home

By NYMetroParents Staff September 22, 2014

If your child's school falls short in effectively teaching math and science, based on Insideschool's extensive research, there is much you can do to supplement his or her learning at home. Here are some ideas to supplement your child's math and science education.

chilren playing chess Chess is ideal in elementary school as kids develop math, spatial, and reasoning skills.

Volunteer at tyour child's school.

Start a chess or robotics club after school or during lunch. Shewonia Bowman, an engineer and the mother of two girls, started an early morning math club with interactive games at PS 199 in Manhattan.
Help children plant a school vegetable garden to teach them about nutrition and the environment.
Chaperone or extend other help on a relevant field trip; excursions to area museums (see “Educational Family Outings”) are good ways to bolster science in the school curriculum, for example.

Practice math drills.

If your child’s school is good at teaching the concepts of math but doesn’t teach quick recall of facts, you may want to supplement at home with more timed drills, a computer program, or flash cards.
If your child doesn’t respond to old-fashioned memorization drills, look for songs or other ways to memorize facts using pictures or objects. For example, you can teach your child to “skip count” by the dreaded 7s by setting the numbers to the tune of “Happy Birthday”: 7, 14, 21 / 28, 35 / 42, 49 / 56, 63…
Visit mathabc.com, a free website loaded with drills, to help with memorization of multiplication tables.

Get creative.

Introduce games such as Yahtzee or Scrabble at home.
Engage kids in studies when they’re actively doing something else they love. One parent got her son a mini-trampoline, and he was much more open to practicing facts when paired with jumping up and down.
Help your children conduct real research: Citizen Science enlists ordinary citizens to count pigeons in cooperation with Cornell University; scientists use the data in their published work. In Project Bud Burst kids find a bush and watch it during the season when the bush opens a bud; it’s a sensitive measure for global climate.
If the teaching leans too much in the direction of “drill and kill,” give your kids the opportunity to try tangrams, mazes, 2-D puzzles, shapes, origami, and visual puzzles.
Take a free workshop offered by NYU’s Courant Institute, where you can pick up ideas such as making shapes out of toothpicks and gumdrops to talk about vertices, faces, and edges. Courant will suggest you Google “DAT = Dental Admissions Test” to find puzzles that help kids ‘see’ math concepts.

The New York metro area is rich with fun family outings that have a STEM bent, including the Museum of Mathematics in Manhattan. Here, MoMath founder and executive director Glen Whitney tests out the Coaster Rollers exhibit, where visitors can propel themselves along a track filled with oddly shaped objects.

Go on educational family outings.

Visit the Museum of Mathematics in Manhattan. This dynamic and interactive museum, which focuses on enhancing public understanding and perception of math in daily life, is the first of its kind in the country.
Take your kids to the annual Maker Faire, a technology and science extravaganza with lots of free hands-on activities, held every September at the New York Hall of Science in Queens. Stop by NYSCI any time of year for the wide array of programs for kids, featuring more than 450 interactive exhibits. The center’s most popular exhibition, Sports Challenge, combines the fields of physics, physiology, and material science to explain the science behind your child’s favorite sport, including baseball, surfing, and drag racing.
Make a wish-list of places—opportunities to engage with science at cultural institutions in our area abound!—that includes the following suggestions, then head out with the kids on slow weekends or evenings when after-school activities are light: American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan; the Bronx Zoo; Liberty Science Center across the Hudson in nearby New Jersey; the Greenburgh Nature Center, a short train ride away in Scarsdale; the New York Aquarium in Brooklyn’s Coney Island; the Town of Ramapo Challenger Center in Rockland County, where kids can be astronauts for a day; the Science Museum of Long Island in Manhasset; the Maritime Aquarium in Norwalk, CT; and the Wolf Conservation Center in South Salem. Find details on these and many more at nymetroparents.com/nature and nymetroparents.com/outings.
Find free after-school activities that provide science and math enrichment throughout New York City at insideschools.org/free-programs.

Find the beauty in math and science.

We want our children to think of math and science as beautiful, not merely useful. Pamela Liebeck, author of How Children Learn Mathematics, says math appeals to kids in much the same way art and music do—based on their intellectual or aesthetic response. Math and science should be appealing—because if it is, kids will want to do more of it.

Sources & Recommended Reading

Sian L. Beilock and her research team found that female teachers unwittingly passed their own math anxiety onto their female students, as reported in “Female Teachers’ Math Anxiety Affects Girls’ Math Achievement.”
When science and literacy lessons are integrated, students demonstrate greater skill in all of these areas, writes lead researcher Gina N. Cervetti in a paper entitled, “A Model of Science-Literacy Integration.”
Many girls believe math ability is fixed—it’s a gift you have or do not have. Girls who believe math is an acquired set of skills do better, according to Carol S. Dweck, in her book: Mindset.
The early years are important: Number sense in first grade predicts math ability in middle school, writes co-author David Geary, citing his team’s research in “Adolescents’ Functional Numeracy Is Predicted by their School Entry Number System Knowledge.”
Stereotype threat can impact student academic performance, according to Claude Steele in: Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do.
Blocks and puzzles can help school readiness; using words such as “between,” “under,” “shorter,” and “longer” can help kids better understand spatial problem-solving tasks, says lead author Brian N. Verdine in “Finding the Missing Piece: Blocks, Puzzles, and Shapes Fuel School Readiness.”
National Girls Collaborative Project presents research focused on what works to engage and support girls in Science, Technology, Math, and Engineering at ngcproject.org.
Games for Math: Playful Ways to Help Your Child Learn Math, From Kindergarten to Third Grade by Peggy Kaye is an easy-to-use book filled with math games to play at home.
Browse and discuss this book with your child age 4-8 to help reinforce number sense: Anno’s Counting Book, by Mitsumasa Anno.
In addition to games and puzzles, Family Math by Jean K. Stenmark, et.al., includes a step-by-step description of how to organize a “family math” class at your child’s school.