8 Fun Ways to Give Your Child Math Help this Holiday Season

Fun, family, festivity and math? Believe it or not, the winter holiday period is the perfect time to give your child a math boost. Take a look at these 8 practical ideas to keep your child’s skills fresh and give them math help this holiday season:

1. Pre and Post Holiday Shopping

Let your child help you with last-minute gift buying. Give them a budget and let them research online for good value suitable gifts. After the holidays, put your child in charge of their gift cards and holiday cash and let them produce a bargain hunting plan of action to make the most of the post-holiday sales.

2. Holiday Cooking and Baking

Whether it’s the Thanksgiving Turkey or the Christmas cookies, let your child help you plan the all-important festive meal. There’s plenty of kitchen preparation math in everything – from calculating the cooking time for the turkey to estimating the number of vegetables for the side dishes,  to working out cooking times for various dishes so that they’re ready to be served on time. Share with your child the math strategies you use to create that perfect meal!

3. Give a Math Gift

Only the keenest young mathematicians would be pleased with a brand new calculator or math T-Shirt as a gift. However, gifts such as a math storybook, a fun facts and figures book, such as the Guinness World Records, will intrigue children of all ages. A new analog watch for an elementary child who is learning to tell the time or a robotics kit for a teenager are also great math gifts.

4. Plan a Trip

Google maps is a great tool for investigating travel times and journey distances. See if your child can use Google Maps, along with their math and logic skills to get your family to your holiday destination on time.

5. Visit a Museum

If you live near New York City you’ve got no excuse to not visit the recently opened Museum of Math. The rest of us can research math related exhibits and workshops at our local science centers, or just wander the science and art museums and highlight the different ways math can be seen in both science and art.

6. Grab a Board Game

Pause the Playstation and dig out that dust-covered Monopoly board or Chess Set. Many family board games involve at least a small element of math, whether it’s using calculations to work out points in a game of Scrabble or the strategies needed to conquer in Parcheesi.

7. Play a Math Travel Game

Road trips and airport delays are a hallmark of the holiday season. Younger children can have some math fun by counting the number of different colored cars on the road, while older kids can practice their arithmetic by adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing numbers on airplane boarding cards or speed limit signs. If you are on a flight another interesting exercise is to find the number of seats in an airplane by using multiplication and addition.

8. Math Help to Review and Get ahead 

Speak to your child’s teacher about which topics your child needs to review over the holiday period and which topics will be coming up in the coming year. Thinkster parents can share this information with their child’s Thinkster coach who can then add suitable worksheets to their child’s Thinkster assignments.

Thinkster Math’s individually tailored digital worksheets are a great way to give your child math help over the holiday season and throughout the year. We cover the whole curriculum from measurements to multiplication including essential holiday season topics such as problem solving and money!