STEM Learning

3 Ways to Help Your Kids Learn Math and Have Fun

March / 2022

Math is a core skill and the foundation for many STEM careers, so why not help kids learn about math while having fun?

The way children are exposed to math at a young age can impact how they view math later on in their academic years. According to prodigygame.com, “17% of Americans suffer from high levels of math anxiety,” and “as early as 1st grade, students can start displaying negative attitudes towards math.”

Math is a core skill and the foundation for many STEM careers. Here at Blocks Rock!, we care about helping young students get excited about math.

In this blog, we’ve outlined three different ways to help your kids learn math and have fun while doing it. Hopefully, by building math skills and enjoying it, they’ll have confidence with math later in their lives too!

Play Games that Involve Math

One of the best ways to learn math is to play fun games! Usually, if the child really enjoys the game, they’ll totally forget that they are practicing math skills. There are many STEM toys out there that help with counting, multiplication and division, addition and subtraction, and many other math-related functions.

Sometimes these games directly practice math skills, and sometimes, they have a way of sneaking it in.

For example, Blocks Rock! is a structured block play game, and it has been linked to improving arithmetic processes in young children. In a study by researchers at the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University and the College of Education at the University of Alabama, structured block play using Blocks Rock! was found to improve addition and subtraction performance while also increasing activation in brain regions linked to memory, motor, and arithmetic processing after block training. Read the study HERE.

You can purchase a Blocks Rock! Game HERE.

Here are some other games we love that help students learn math in a fun way:

Bake or Cook with Your Kids

Baking or cooking is a great way to work on math without realizing it! This is a great option for children who are wary of sitting down “just” to do math. Pick a recipe for a food they really enjoy and will get excited about making! Once you have the recipe, you can double it, half it, or just change it to fit the number of people you’re serving. As you go through the ingredients, have your child figure out the amount you need of each ingredient.

Baking and cooking can simultaneously be a science experiment! Why does baking powder make things rise? Why does water take up more space as an ice cube? Why would we need to soften the butter instead of completely melting it? These are great questions to think about and ask your child as you go along in the recipe.

At the end, they even get a yummy reward for all of their hard work! Sounds like a great time to us.

Here are some cooking or baking kits that might be fun to incorporate into your home:

Learn an Instrument

While learning an instrument may sound like more of a "creative" activity, learning music theory actually involves a lot of math!

Learning scales, reading notes, matching pitches, and counting rhythms involves a lot of fractions, decimals, percents, counting, and more. Plus it has actually been proven that young children who learn instruments score higher in mathematics. This quote is just one of many examples of studies we’ve found who have researched this topic:

“Our research consistently shows that young children provided with instrumental instruction score significantly higher on tasks measuring spatial-temporal cognition, hand-eye coordination, and arithmetic.” – The MozartEffect: Music Listening is Not Music Instruction,” Frances H. Rauscher Department of Psychology University of Wisconsin Oshkosh Sean C. Hinton Department of Neurology Medical College of Wisconsin

Here are some Music Theory books that might be useful to help aid music lessons for your child:

Math in Everyday Life

While intentionally making time for activities that involve math is a great way to get your kids excited about math, using math in everyday situations is awesome, too! You can talk about math on your way to the bank, at the grocery store, at the playground, or just around the house! Math is everywhere, and it can be important for your child to know just how often it comes up in daily activities.

If you’re interested in learning more about how Blocks Rock! can help improve math skills in young students, read about our study HERE.