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How to improve my maths?

16 replies

Nonumbersplease · 19/02/2024 09:59

I have a DC at primary school and one soon to be, and want to be able to support them with maths homework. My own maths is absolutely dreadful, to the extent that I struggle with some Year 4 maths work they bring home. I got a C at GCSE maths myself but had generally really shit maths teachers and was always made to feel stupid for not understanding stuff. I'm not talking retaking my maths GCSE but does anyone know of any kind of maths top up course or resource I could use to improve my undeatanding?

OP posts:
WandaWonder · 19/02/2024 10:04

Following, I did pretty good at uni maths

I am absolutely hopeless at school maths these days

DrunkenElephant · 19/02/2024 10:05

Corbett Maths is a good source, you can print worksheets off online for different areas and then check your answers.

BBC Bitesize might be good too?

I retook my GCSE Maths last year and used Corbett Maths, Youtube and past exam papers that I just printed off online and then marked myself.

itisneverending · 19/02/2024 10:06

Make sure you know your times table facts by heart. They filter into so many areas of mathematics.
BBC bitesize maths is really good.

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Midnightstar76 · 19/02/2024 10:07

I was also about to suggest Corbett maths. DD in yr 11 taking GCSE’s and has these. So I plan on using them too to brush up my maths skills

Midnightstar76 · 19/02/2024 10:08

And agree timetables are so important to help with maths

Tulsahurricanes · 19/02/2024 10:09

Khan academy is great, I have been using that for years to get my maths up to a decent level.

SquidgersMummy · 19/02/2024 10:11

The Brilliant app is amazing! Also there’s a more basic maths course on Duolingo - I did this as a sort of refresher.

SquidgersMummy · 19/02/2024 10:13

I think when I signed up to Brilliant I Google and found a discount - it’s was something to go with getting people into STEM and saying I was going to use it with the kids homeschooling 🫣🫣 I’ve been learning algebra….never liked it at school.

glusky · 19/02/2024 10:44

If it's to help your kids I would try to stay on their learning curve. They'll be doing things like number lines and numicon that you probably never learned. Learn it their way, and your knowledge will be more useful to them, plus it's probably better at building a fundamental understanding of the building blocks than how you were taught.

I can't recommend a book personally but something along the genre of "Maths for Mums and Dads" or even maths books aimed at primary school kids, might be a good shout. Are more adult resources actually better, or might you as well get the Usborne Book of Times Tables (which is lovely btw and really helpful at aiding understanding) and look at it yourself before you give it to the kids? I hope you don't take this as patronising, I genuinely think it is better than taking a sheet of times tables and trying to learn them straight. If you can picture the page with the bunches of bananas for the 6x table, your brain will hang onto it infinitely better, and when your child is stuck on 6x6 you can remind them to think in bananas.

Kjarten Poskett wrote the Murderous Maths series which is superb at explaining mathematical concepts in a really accessible way. I don't think Murderous Maths is exactly what you're after as it deliberately goes much wider and more advanced than the national curriculum but I would look at what else he's done.

In terms of helping your kids, in the early days a lot is about helping them get to grips with the real basics. Get some clicky blocks or improvise with counters or bits of pasta. We even had numicon. The more they do IRL with physical objects in their hands, the more they will embed the concepts. Don't push them to abstract it, push them to get physical objects out and move them around in space, or if they are a few years older to go back to a number line. I would try to do this stuff with them and learn number bonds, number lines, crossing 10 etc along with them. New maths. You don't need to remember your GCSE old maths to do new maths.

Nonumbersplease · 19/02/2024 10:46

Thanks all these are great suggestions

I actually know my times tables off by heart as my mum taught them to me using music, which I've done with my son too, and they've always stuck.

OP posts:
Octavia64 · 19/02/2024 10:47

Primary maths now is taught in quite different ways to when parents were at school so even parents who are good at maths aren't really used to the new ways.

Corbett maths and khan academy are more secondary maths although they do have some upper primary stuff.

If you just want to sort your maths, use those.

If you want to see how they do it these days in primary, have a look at white rose maths.

guitarpluckingchicken · 19/02/2024 11:38

Physical resources as @glusky says, children do better when given physical counters to move, so dividing 12 counters between 3 drawn circles helps them better than just the abstract concept of 12 divided by 3. Numicon or my preference, base 10 (so individual cubes, sticks of 10 and a plate of 100) are my favourites. This shows you what that is https://www.amazon.co.uk/Wissner-WissnerR39578-000-Coloured-Dienes-Multi-Color/dp/B06Y5KW4FX

The best person to talk to is their teacher to ask what resources they use in class. I especially like fraction pies or linear ones to show equivalents. There are lots of online resources for this, again the teacher is the best person to ask. This means you will be going to the right websites and honestly teachers love it when you help your child as it helps them.

I used Carol Vordeman's Help Your Kids Maths to help me help them alongside school advising me. They definitely use Khan Academy in upper KS2 at my children's primary.

FractalBob · 04/12/2024 08:54

My eldest daughter had a similar experience to yours during elementary school: math teachers who didn't understand the subject and ended up confusing the kids. I remember trying to help my daughter with her math homework by explaining some concept (I have a Ph.D. in Mathematics from UC Berkeley, California) and she, frustrated would reply, "But that's not what Sylvie [her math teacher] told us!". 39 years later and she's still a 0 when it comes to math and it pains me.

18 years ago that changed when I started a weekly after-school Math club whose goal was to reveal the beauty of math to elementary school-age kids. Forget about memorizing arithmetic tables. I just focused on fun stuff, like counting in binary on their fingers. I'd start off asking the kids how high they can count on one hand and when they said "5", I'd show them how they could count to 31 and that got their attention. They were so proud of knowing something that their playmates didn't they would show off to the others how high they could count. This one "project" led to related ones that we would do in the following weeks.

Anyway, I wrote an Android app named Plato's Playground that uses an AI avatar named "Rachel" (named after my youngest daughter and who physically resembles the avatar) who interacts with kids in showing them how to count in binary. You can download it for US$ 4.99 from Google Play but it's free to schools; write to me for details.

Plato's Playground - Apps on Google Play

Teaches young children how to count in binary on their fingers.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.chiaramail.platosplayground

SummersMath · 11/02/2025 18:07

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bifurCAT · 11/02/2025 18:12

I respect you for your desire and efforts, kudos. 👍

shellyleppard · 11/02/2025 18:14

Try your local adult education centre, they do maths courses up to GCSE level. I had to go back to "school" myself to keep up with my children's homework

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