I recently released an update to my open sourced JavaScript 📝 Math Homework Generator to support my most valuable, loyal user: me. I am a parent of 3 and summer break just started and with COVID keeping the kids at home and in order to keep them from simply gluing their eyes to their tablet screens, I give them something to learn and practice: math homework.
➕ Maybe I'm playing along with stereotypes, but I want to teach my kids things I didn't know and that was to practice math. Math is like a muscle you work at and I never really exercised it until I got a Math minor in college. I also used to be a Kumon (a franchise cram school) assistant correcting students' worksheets. So I saw the value in it, but it needs to be done right.
🥅 My goal in giving my kids generated worksheets is to have them learn simple math concepts, be challenged, and build that into muscle memory. What I don't want is them to stress out over it. It should feel like a jog in the park, not a grueling path to failure (which is what happened 😱).
I had my daughters do worksheets previously and they did them so often it got too easy. That made me think that they were ready for tougher problems. Turns out, going from simple division to long-division was too big of a jump in difficulty.
There were a few tears, but also many words of encouragement and apologies.
Turns out my 8 year old needed to be taught several math concepts that she was not yet accustomed to. I sat down with her to do one whole side of a worksheet, which I thought was more than enough to get her started. She forgot everything the next day and I sat down with her again. I think I improved my explanation, but I knew that it was too early to keep her on this path.
My next steps:
- Ease her into it. I think solving the same problems she did previously but in the "long division" format would have gone a long way.
- Keep the numbers small and the next iteration would introduce remainders to practice seeing numbers that do not nicely fit with their numerator.
My other daughter on the other hand, her start into multiplication seemed too easy. My goal was to get her comfortable with seeing the "x" (times) symbol and being able to count the emojis to get the product helped a lot. She picked it up easily. I have some ideas on easing her into the next step, which would include multiplying with one number at a time up to 9.
I think the most important thing when teaching as a parent to do for your kids is to really sync with your kids. See what works for them and what doesn't, which is what I'm doing with worksheet's I'm generating. I'm seeing what would work easier and better.
If you're using the Homework Generator, feel free to send me your suggestions and ideas!