Study's Fun Dec 2014 | Page 9

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“I hate to practice math,” claim is a lie!

Accept it. Because, there are students who play a piano or a guitar on their own for hours trying to get a new style to become natural. Then there are kids who work for days to perfect tossing a soccer ball from between their feet, over their shoulders and from behind. What is it that takes practice from being a chore to becoming an obsession? The answer is desire. Desire can lead a person to anything he wants to achieve in life.

Think out of the box!

Math provides the most useful skills that you can learn. The trouble is most of us fail to see the practical use of it. Understand that you cannot escape from math and you just need to change how you think about it. The entire universe operates on math and you’ll find it interesting to discover some of the amazing truths if you make the effort.

Every person can do math!

You don’t have to be gifted to learn math because any average person can learn it all the time.

What does it take to be successful at math?

• Desire to learn

Regular practice

• Researching the facts that link math with everyday activities

How can parents encourage their kids to love math?

What to do?

Be Positive!

• Help your child have a “can do” attitude by praising your child's efforts in learning math.

• Acknowledge the facts that math can be challenging at times and that persistence and hard work are the keys to success.

• Help your child to understand that struggling at times in math is normal and is actually necessary to, and valuable in understanding math.

• Discuss logics and math problems together. Even if the solution is not found by the effort of the whole family, your child would benefit from seeing the problem from different angles and exploring different approaches.

Link math with daily life

• Help your child realize that math is a significant part of everyday life.

• Show your child that every day, people face situations that involve math, such as deciding whether there is enough money to purchase a list of items at the store, reading a map, building a budget, deciding on the shortest route to a destination, developing a schedule, or determining the price of an item on sale etc.

Make math fun

• Play board games, solve puzzles, and ponder brainteasers with your child. Your child enjoys these kinds of activities while enhancing his/her mathematical thinking.

• Point out the math involved

in each game, and have your

child discuss the strategies

he/she used.