Working with parents who hate math

Many parents do not have good math skills and/or do not feel confident about their skills. They are often reluctant to come to a “math group,” so it may be better to include some of these activities as literacy activities, then talk about how they are designed to teach math, too. When parents are comfortable with that, begin to use the label “math activities” if you like.

Set up a safe, supportive atmosphere where there is no “right” answer. In the groups that tested these activities, many parents commented on the importance of seeing that there were many ways to do something, many ways to get an “answer.” Knowing that took away the stress they usually felt about math.

Parents need time to do the activities themselves before they work with their children. They need time to figure out what to do so they can be confident about the procedure when they work with their kids. They need time to enjoy doing the activity so they can appreciate their child’s pleasure in it; they need to be surprised themselves by how things turn out so they can be motivated to let their kids discover the surprise.

As you work with parents and children on these activities, you can model confidence building and “scaffolding” of skills. Two concepts are behind all of the activities included here. First, every parent and child can find a way to do the activities that is right for them. When the parent and child find their way to a successful outcome, it builds their confidence to do it again in another situation. Parents begin to see how they can work with the child to increase the child’s self-confidence, not by praise but by the child’s own sense of accomplishment.

Second, parents support their child’s learning by building a scaffold to support them as they learn new skills, which means following the child’s lead in play. For example, the parent does not decide, “Today I’m going to teach one-to-one correspondence of number to item.” Rather, the parent notices that, in play, the child is sharing 5 candies out to 5 stuffed toys, or making a series of trips with a toy truck, carrying 1 big block at a time to the other side of the rug. The parent offers a question or a comment that helps the child notice that having 5 candies and 5 toys mean that every toy gets 1 candy; or that moving 3 big blocks means 3 trips across the rug.

We are “scaffolding” the child’s learning when we see that he is building a tower of blocks that is getting shaky as it get higher, and we put our hands around the tower as he puts another block on top. We are not building the tower for him, but we are making sure that his lack of dexterity in placing the latest block does not destroy all the work he has done so far. We know our child, so we know what kind and how much support he needs; we give him that support so he can do what he wants, and learn what he needs to learn.