Parent Involvement in Math

“At the end of the day, the most overwhelming key to a child’s success is the positive involvement of parents.”        – Jane D. Hull

Studies show that parent involvement has a positive impact on student achievement in mathematics.  To make the most of these home-school connections, we must make families aware that learning goes far beyond simply helping with homework.  Just as we stress the importance of a parent’s good modeling by reading to their child every night, we should encourage them to make math literacy a part of their daily interactions too.  One of the most important things parents can do is to expose their children to the practical applications of math that are ever-present in the world around them.  Here are a few ways that teachers and parents can team together to promote math literacy for our young mathematicians.

Teachers can:

• Assign open-ended meaningful math homework that has clear explanations.  (more quality – not quantity)
• Communicate!  Provide multiple means of interactive communication to parents and share ways they can support their child’s learning at home.
• Provide examples, photos, and links for parents, so that they are clear of expectations.
• Support parents and make them aware of processes, vocabulary, and everyday math opportunities.
• Encourage children to share the ways they use math at home.
• Invite parents to volunteer and help with hands-on math explorations in the classroom.

Parents can:

• Look for meaningful math opportunities at home.
• Develop calendar skills by planning appointments, activities, and special events together and marking them on the calendar.
• Cook together and discuss measurements and quantities.
• Develop money sense by shopping together.  Build awareness of what is available to spend and the price or value of specific items to be purchased.
• Estimate.  How long do you think it will take to complete an activity or travel somewhere?  While grocery shopping, estimate the total of your purchases by rounding off prices.
• Problem solve together.  If we will have a total of 5 people at dinner and we want everyone to have 2 cookies for dessert, how many cookies will we need?
• Play games.  Dominoes, card games, and board games all provide great opportunities for developing counting and reasoning skills.
• Use math language to help children make connections between the math they are learning at school and the world around them.
• Look for and discuss mathematics in the media.
• Help their children learn that math is a meaningful part of their everyday lives.

When parents have real mathematical conversations with their children, they help them connect to the math they are exploring at school.  When we work as a team, it helps our students see the ways that math is ever-present and meaningful in their lives.

The U.S. Department of Education has created a resource entitled Helping Your Child Learn Mathematics.  It offers parents a variety of activities to build the math literacy of preschoolers through 5th graders.

Check it out here:  https://edsource.org/wp-content/uploads/old/math.pdf