Tip of the Week

July 29, 2013

The “mental math” game

If you’re traveling with the kids this summer, here’s a fun activity for the car or airplane that will help encourage and strengthen mental math skills. Verbally give your child a multi-operation problem involving as many operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and even square roots and exponents) as she is comfortable with. As your child becomes more adept at solving these problems, increase their difficulty. And if you are up for the challenge, have your child give YOU the problem: she will have to solve it at the same time you do (to make sure you got the right answer), and will have the additional benefit of feeling like she is the master of the game.