It’s all about how we feel about math and whether we develop positive or negative associations from a young age. It’s worth it to put in the effort to bring in a little joy!

Yes, exactly! It’s completely possible to have pleasant, exciting math-related memories if we take the time to make it enjoyable for our kids. 😄

Absolutely! The more positive memories we can help our kids have related to math, the less likely they are to be “people who hate math.” The more they see themselves as someone who enjoys math, the more potential they have to grow in their math skills regardless of their current abilities. 😊

Hi Kristi! Once kids are older, if parents need help understanding how to do the problems beyond what is in the answer key, I’ve been recommending Everything You Need to Ace Math in One Big Fat Notebook which is less than $10 on Amazon. However, it’s important to me that my kids don’t think of math as a list of procedures to memorize, so we just look at each problem one at a time and I help them solve them using as much or as little assistance as needed. I want the problems to make sense to them, but I would rather them make connections on their own as much as possible rather than me tell them the answers so we don’t do typical math “lessons.” I hope that’s helpful!

I could not agree more. ❤️

Yes! Card games are such a a great way to build math fluency with low numbers which is SO helpful when working with bigger numbers.