Encouraging young learners to improve their math skills continually is a complex process that requires the intervention of both educators and parents. Indeed, the support of children’s early math abilities secures higher success rates later in the future, which makes it imperative for families to provide a proper learning environment at home. However, despite the promising statistic, many parents still fail to promote math education at home, mostly because they feel uncertain about their own skills. Thus, in order to address these issues, teachers are to define tangible strategies of communication with parents and show them the ways to support their children despite any socio-economic challenges and issues.
Thus, the first strategy would be to discuss educational options that include both math explanations from external sources and spending some quality time as a family. For example, the teacher may present web sources such as PBS KIDS or Bedtime Math to the parents in order to show how many tools could help them improve the math literacy of their family. The second strategy would be to define the ways in which the family interacts with math on a daily basis. For instance, teachers may create get-together meetings with families in order to discuss various math problems and their solutions.
This informal activity is extremely helpful in terms of helping parents realize that, in most cases, their math skills are already automatized, and all they need is to find the right words to convey this information and practice to their kids. Thus, when assisting parents in the context of math literacy promotion, it is of paramount importance to make sure that the educator does not judge or evaluate the socio-economic or educational background of the family. On the contrary, the teacher’s primary intention should be to demonstrate how math literacy may be promoted equally in every household.