Kids love to play and they easily learn new lessons if they do not perceive these lessons as learning. Developing fun math lessons is the key to successfully teach your kids math and creating games that your kids will enjoy will make math learning fun and easy for them. You can create math board games, card games or puzzles for your kids that will sustain their interest and enhance their math skills.
Here are some pointers on how to develop fun math lessons and games for your kids:
1. Find out which math areas your child has to master or practice on. It will help if you can ask your child’s math teacher and find out the specific areas your child is having difficulties with. This information will help you design a fun math lesson that will focus on the areas where your child needs help on.
2. Research on books and online resources that you can use to build your math lesson on. You can also check out math concepts from math books which you can use as a story line or content
3. Make a list of math problems and answers that you can use and which your child will be able to practice on.
4. Determine the development levels and ages of the target players.
5. Determine the type or style of game you would like to develop, choosing from:
- Lotto games will allow children to understand and practice the concepts of one-to-one correspondence, matching and counting skills.
- Short path games will allow children to follow a short path to reach a goal requiring them to do some abstract thinking before they are allowed to proceed to the next space.
- Circular path games teach children how to follow rules and how to take turns even if they are competing. There is a goal that has to be achieved in playing this type of game.
- Long path games allow for multiple players and more complex elements until the end of the path is reached.
- Tug-of-war path games provide options for children to make decisions because there are two paths to take and two ends to reach such that in-between the players are to decide which path to take.
6. Bring out those old board games, cards and puzzles from the storage. Parts and pieces of these old game paraphernalia can be used to devise your own fun games. You can also use old cardboard and colored markers to make your game boards colorful and attractive to children.
7. Create the game that your kids can grow up with or a game that can be used by kids of all ages. The game should be flexible enough that you can just add questions or cards or spinners to be able to expand it or introduce other concepts.
8. Make your game paraphernalia as sturdy as possible so that it can be used repeatedly and will last longer.
Engaging the attention of your child for a math lesson is really quite difficult but having games and lessons which he will truly enjoy will make the work easy for you and help improve and enhance your child’s math skills.