Practical ways to help your child feel confidence with maths - right at home
If your child feels anxious, forgets what they’ve learned, or avoids maths altogether, you’re not alone.
Dyscalculia Pathway provides simple, hands-on strategies that make learning feel achievable – and even fun!
Why home support makes a difference
You know your child the best and your child. Here are some of the reasons why you are the best person to help your child with their maths!
Confidence and Motivation
More, short bursts of practice
Multi-sensory learning
Experience Maths
To find out more about Understanding Dyscalculia, please click the button below:
Make maths visible, tangible and memorable
Multi-sensory learning means using lots of different senses while learning a concept, in particular, touch, sight and sound.
For students with dyscalculia, using multi-sensory learning makes a huge difference. It helps children with dyscalculia who struggle with number sense and symbols, develop understanding of the size of different numbers and often remember the visual, active learning more easily than the written symbolic numbers.
Using beads or a rekenrek to build friends of 10
Use baking to explore measurement, fractions using cups as well as arrays for multiplication
Use cuisenaire rods to explore patterns and show addition and subtraction visually
Small steps that make a big difference
Keep sessions short (5 – 10 minutes only)
Short quick sessions are far more effective than long sessions. Playing a quick game to recall friends of 10 or deal out 6 cards and quickly find the total, are easy to do and quick to complete.
Celebrate effort, not results
For children with dyscalculia, it is really important to recognise the effort they are putting into their learning. Most of the time, they will be comparing themselves to other students and feeling that they are not good at maths. The more we can help them to see that they are making progress and trying hard, the more they will continue to try.
Play maths games together
There are so many different types of maths games that you can play with your child. For our students, Top Trumps is an absolute favourite as well as Skyjo with our students who have dyscalculia. Through playing games like these, children come to see that using numbers can be fun rather than scary! Another favourite at the moment is Bingo!
Use everyday activities
Many of the activities that you already do with your child, such as cooking, shopping and playing sports already involve a lot of different maths. Using your child’s interests and hobbies, creates lots of different opportunities for your child to subtly learn maths while feeling relaxed and enjoying themselves.
Why your child forgets - and how to help them remember
Forgetting is part of dyscalculia. It is really important to recognise this as often people think that people with dyscalculia are lazy and this is not true.
In school, there is a lot of pressure put on children to learn their maths facts – their friends of ten, counting up and down in 2s, 5s and 10s as well as times tables. For students with dyscalculia, this is extremely difficult and many people with dyscalculia never learn their number facts. However, using short, 5 minute bursts of revision and review alongside spaced repetition and visual reminders, it is possible for most people with dyscalculia to remember some of their number facts.
As a parent, it is also important to reassure your child. Let them know that forgetting is normal for them and that you don’t expect them to remember. By telling your child this, it takes the pressure away and this can help some of the number facts stick.
If you’d like to read more about the importance of repetition in maths, click here.
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