Using Competition And Rewards In Teaching Math

Check out The Christian Unschool

Competition and rewards can provide children with a great deal of motivation. This can be used to your advantage in turning your children on to math. For instance, you could offer your child a penny for each page that they complete in their math book. No child is too young for this incentive. You may want to reconsider this motivational tool after your child earns their first dollar because by then your child will know that they are able to do math and that math really is great fun.

Another way in which to turn your child on to math is by having a timed math bee. In preparation for this event your child should copy down 4 pages of math problems. Once this is done you can time her to see how long it will take her to fill in all of the answers to these problems. You and your child can then have fun trying to get faster and faster at doing this type of math problem. You could then offer a really cheap prize whenever your child is able to do all of the problems within a set amount of time. This will be enough to motivate your child to start thinking about math as though it were an exciting game.

The idea here is simply to make your child's first experience with math a lot of fun. Of course, this means that you can do a variety of things. For instance, you may want to allow your child to work out their math problems, using M&Ms as counters. Then, when they get the answer correct you can allow your child to eat the M&Ms. Another thing that you can do is allow your child to work out money problems with real money. Your child could then be allowed to keep the change if they get the problem right. Of course, you will not want to do either of these things for very long but it really is not necessary to do so because these are only ways in which to help your child see just how fun math really can be.

Now with how advanced the Internet is becoming, you can also find a lot of educational math games for your children to play online. Then you will not have to sit there working with your child in order for them to be able to improve their skills. However, you can still use flashcards if you want. If you choose to do this you can make this into a game as well. For instance, whenever your child gets a problem right he can keep the card. You can then do this until he gets the entire deck. Your child will feel like a winner whenever you play in this manner and thus here to you are creating positive feelings whenever it comes to math. He may also get more practice as he tries to figure out just how many cards he still needs to get in order to have the entire deck.