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According to a study by the Partnership for Learning, an average student can forget 60 percent of the math skills they learned during the school year.
Simple card games can teach and keep multiplication or addition skills fresh; assisting parents with menu planning, or home improvement projects teach and reinforce problem solving; an inexpensive stopwatch can open dozens of doors and questions of time and rate of speed ratios.
This summer especially, challenging a child to determine the cost of gasoline for a day or weekend trip can be very instructive. While empowering him or her to find answers to such questions.
Here are tips to enhance summer learning in math:
1. Set a budget for a picnic and ask your child to "find the bargains" using the price per ounce figures on the supermarket shelves: "which one is really cheaper?"
2. Play "War" with a deck of cards, but with math twists: each player throws down two (or three) cards and adds or multiplies them ? the highest (or lowest) sum or product wins the hand.? Ask your child to invent a new version with the math he or she knows.
3. Dominos: an old fashioned game that teaches number sense, strategy, and problem solving and strengthens those skills at any grade level.
4. Cook: Following recipes, cutting it in half for fewer servings, or tripling it for a large gathering teaches very practical skills. Even a batch of lemonade can reinforce these skills.
5. Track the temperature and humidity over the summer -- plot it on a chart.
6. When doing home improvement projects large or small, even young children can assist with taking measurements and computing amounts of materials needed and feel great pitching in as well.
7. Involve children in gardening: have the children determine the area of the garden.? Have them calculate the amount of space taken up by tomatoes versus cucumbers, etc. Have students weigh the vegetables after they are picked.
8. Have children set up a simple rain gauge to measure the amount of rain over the course of a month or the whole summer.
9. Get an odometer for their bicycles and to use the distance traveled to calculate their average rate of speed. Children love to know how fast and how far they go.
10. If you ride the links, have your children use a stopwatch to calculate the average rate of speed a train travels between stations. You can even sometimes get an employee to tell them if they're on target.
11. Have your children keep a chart indicating how much time they spend reading, watching television, doing chores, and playing. Children can determine what fraction of the day or week they spend on each activity. Students can also keep a chart indicating how they spend money each week.
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