Turning Maths Homework from Stressful to Successful
How does homework time in your house make you feel? Is it different for different subjects?
Do you feel like you can’t help your child with their maths? Does it feel like it’s different from when you were at school?
Are you someone who hates maths? Does it fill you with dread? Have you considered that the way that maths is taught now might help you get over that?
You are not alone.
You are not their teacher, so you must not expect that of yourself.
Every parent wants to help their child, but your own skills and confidence can get in the way. This can lead you to feeling inadequate and frustrated, and can lead you to take it out on your child. That’s why I set up Skills4Parents, and exactly why I run Foundations4Homework!
Here are a few of my top tips to help you transform your experience of maths homework from stressful to successful:
Model reframing
Your attitude towards something will feed down to your child, but your own experiences will also have an impact on how you feel. Therefore it’s important that you reframe your words and thoughts. Instead of saying ‘I can’t do this either’ say ‘I find this challenging, but let’s work on this together’, model how to reframe a statement and demonstrate it.
Encourage a growth mindset
A growth mindset encourages effort, so praise your child for their perseverance, point out that they don’t find something easy, but they are improving. Ability isn’t fully fixed, it’s fluid and they can learn and improve. When they say ‘I can’t do it’ add ‘yet’ on to the end of the sentence.
Find out about what they learn in school
This might be a shameless plug for my training, but you might find that when you understand the methods that are learnt in school, you’ll see the benefits. You may even find that you feel more confident with maths. So that’s where I come in, what have you got to lose?
Make homework a pleasant experience
I asked on my facebook profile thoughts for what I should put in my ‘parental homework success package’, which will be one of the prizes in the Smorgasbord of Maths free training, and it gave me an insight into some of the things my friends do. For the parents, suggestions included uplifting essential oils, stress balls, nice pens and notebooks, and headache tablets! For the children, one family has a chocolate milk ritual, which sounds lovely.