JohnPicard33

The most common response I get from people when I tell them I am a math teacher is "oh I am horrible in math" or "I hated math when I was younger". Well guess what? They are all right! If you believe you are bad at math then there is very little chance you will ever become good at math. This thinking stems from what the mind believes the body will achieve. If you are thinking you are bad at math, or will always be bad at math, then stop it. Stop it right now. That is if you ever wish to be anything else than bad at math. All you are doing is telling yourself what to be and what patterns follow. By telling yourself all of this, what do you think your brain wants to follow.There are people who don't realize the clear parallels between learning math and learning many other skills. It goes without saying, that to be good at math takes practice. We learn to multiply, add, subtract, and divide by practicing these skills hundreds or thousands of times. We weren't born knowing how to multiply single and double digits numbers in our heads. We learned this through many hours of practice. Math worksheets are a simple, effective, and proven way to teach kids math. They are used by millions of children and in hundreds of thousands of classrooms every day. With the advent of the internet, one more opportunity to practice is only a click away.Many teachers believe that grading is a form of feedback. It isn't. Grading, when done well, can be a form of assessment of learning, but the distinction should be clear. Grades are not an effective tool as assessment for learning. Grades are the end of the road, when you assess what has been learned, but they should not be intended to inform a student where to go next.Play this family game: Draw a number line with ten or more numbers on it. Each person gets a chance to choose two numbers on the line. The next person has to make a "bigger than" or "smaller than" statement with the numbers. Also use terms like "larger than", "more than" and "less than". Make some deliberate mistakes to see if your child can spot them!Most often, children struggle when it comes to learning math and percentage not limiting them to the usual way of learning can be your key to motivating them to learn. Flash cards are the usual ways of learning math in school but you don't have to stick to what the teachers are using. There are many creative ways at home to make them learn.After your child has mastered this, choose at random some of the numbers you wrote in the earlier activity and ask your child to arrange them in order without looking at a number line.Math is important because it is the most widely used subject in the world. Think about it, every profession uses some sort of math. From the engineer to the waiter at the restaurant who counts the change, knowledge of some sort of math is essential. In this day and age, many professions actually depend on math. Math is also one of the most important subjects at school. A kid that doesn't do well in math will probably have difficulty becoming successful in school.