If you are a homeschooling parent, you are also very likely a homeschool math teacher. As if homeschooling weren't hard enough, teaching math by itself can take up a huge chunk of your teaching time, and even a greater share of your pre-occupations. Fortunately, us homeschooling parents have access to the internet and numerous tools for teaching from online games to virtual manipulatives.
In addition to using the many tools available for help with instructing your children on math, you should also set a positive attitude toward math. According to www2.ed.gov, Although parents can be a positive force in helping children learn math, they also can undermine their children’s math ability and attitudes by saying
things such as: “Math is hard,” or “I’m not surprised you don’t do well in math, I didn’t like math either when I was in school,” or “I wasn’t very good in math and I’m a success, so don’t worry about doing well.”
Instead, it is better to make math as fun as possible. Play number games. Have multiplication contests. Let your child see you doing math for fun. Get books on fun math facts, and challenge your children to do a math riddle every day. Before long you will find that both you and your children have fallen in love with math, and you will make your entire homeschooling experience more enjoyable.
Before I go, I want to add a last bit of advice. Spend time on word problems every day. I have been working with a young man recently who can crunch numbers easily. Show him a math problem and he can do it... unless it is in word form. When a problem is in word problem form, he cannot figure out where to start. It is quite a conundrum that can be avoided by working with word problems early on and introducing math to solve problems instead of numeric functions to figure out.
~posted by Andrea from Notes from a Homeschooling Mom
