Guilt Free Math Lessons For When You Need Time to Work or Shower

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Listen, this timetable that schools sent us is fantastic and all, showing great strides from what everyone learned in a year. But some days the e-learning is just not going to work. The kids will be frustrated, upset at the situation, or sad when they see their friends but can’t play with them. Plus, many of us are now back to balancing our own work and household tasks, never mind showering, while facilitating e-learning for kids.

So what happens if the kids just won’t sit down for math class, or you know your preschooler wants to learn more addition but can’t wrap your head around a curriculum? You can pull up this handy list of fun math lessons rooted in real life.

Do you have suggestions? We want to hear all your math tricks in the comments!

Coin Stacks

Grab all those coins that rattle around in pockets or have piled up in a drawer, since who carries cash anymore? Have them stack each in a pile of just that same coin, then count each stack, line them up by height, and see whether the highest pile is the largest amount.

Toy Store

While you have the coins out, start playing toy store. If you don’t actually have coins then they can cut little circles and bills to use. Or, get out your Monopoly set and put those bills to use. Get your kid(s) to choose ten toys and line them up like they’re on display in the store. They can make signs and practice their writing, attaching price tags to each item. Then it’s dress-up time and kids can pretend to be customers and shopkeepers as they count out the play money and purchase their toys.

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Make Your Own Math Game

Take the board from any board game, two dice, and play the game. Except, wait! If you roll a double of any number, then each player needs to subtract the amounts on the dice from each other, not add them together! And when you roll a double again, it returns to adding the numbers on the die.

Need to Cook? Teach Them Fractions!

Sometimes it’s hard to have your kids help you cook. It always takes longer than when you do it yourself and quite frankly, it’s messier. But I like to find recipes that require us to use fractions to make different sized helpings, and show them how to figure it out themselves. It’s also a great excuse to make cupcakes!

Have Montessori, Will Add Numbers

We got this simple Montessori-inspired math game, where you count up all the different colors for different parts of your math problem. Even if you don’t have the set, just cut index cards into smaller squares, write numbers, and the addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and equals symbols on them. Then take a few different colored pipe cleaners or crayons or anything you can use to count out each numeral. You’ve got yourself a math game!

Melts in Your Mouth, Not in Your… Sum?

Take a die or two and roll the cube, then whoever correctly adds up the numbers first earns that same number of M&M’s, as long as they also count the accurate sum themselves. As long as you have enough M&M’s – and dental insurance – throw in a third die!

Clock Em!

Telling time can be a little abstract at different ages, and the best way we found to get it in their bodies – quite literally – is to make a huge clock on a wall out of construction paper. Give your kid big construction paper “hands” as gloves, call out different times, and see how quickly they can make it with their hands! It also works for a PE lesson if your kid gets really good at it.

Please Just Wait a Minute

Even asking them to wait ten minutes requires math. Pretty quickly we realized that our son mixed up minutes with seconds, and so we taught him that when we need five minutes to finish an email before we can play, that’s 5×60, which equals…….if you said 300, you get the point! Then they get to count down from 300 before holding you to your word!

Really, nearly everything can be a math lesson. But counting is really fun, and the more they learn, the more mysteries about the world they unlock!

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Photos: Pexels, Cindy Marie Jenkins

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