People Who Work with Parents

If you work with parents who want to help their kids succeed in school, you can use the activities in this manual with your group. The goal of the activities is to help parents nurture their children’s math thinking and working, and to develop children who love math, who can solve problems in daily life by using numbers, patterns, and shapes, and who are confident in their abilities and proud of their contributions to family life.

Aboriginal parents made up the majority of people who tested the activities, and the manual was designed to include them and their children. You can use the activities in any order. The activities are grouped in themes to make it easy to find material to interest the group you are working with. Each activity has variations to take into account different levels of math skill and other abilities.

Instructions and supporting materials for parents are written in plain English so that even those parents who may not read or speak English well can use them.

There are three kinds of material for parents here:

1. The material in the preceding section of this introduction.
   
   
2. The supporting material and directions for doing the activities that make up the main body of this manual. You can decide how much, if any, of this material to make available to the parents in your group.
   
   
3. The material designed for parents to take home after a group session. This may be a pattern for building something or a game board or score sheet for the game they have learned in the group, or a full-page poster designed to go on the fridge to remind parents of the highlights of the session.