Mid-Summer Math

Speaking of Education

Mid-Summer Math

During the summer many of us load our children into the car and go on vacation.  The trip in the car gives you a great chance to work on your child’s math skills and keep them occupied all at the same time! 

• Work on their math computation skills.  Fill a plastic bag with pennies and give them out as your children answer math questions correctly.  If they answer incorrectly, you may want to take a penny back from your child.  If you have children on different levels, you may alternate the difficulty of the questions with the children.  Beyond asking questions such as ‘6+4= what,” you can make longer math sentences filled with addition, subtraction, division and multiplication.
• Work on clock math.  Ask your children questions based upon the question, “when are we going to get there?”  The question would be phrased similar to, “It is 5:49, what time will it be in 27 minutes?” You may want to give out pennies for correct answers during the clock math “game.”
• Work on graphing.  While playing the license plate game, graph the results.  A favorite type for the license plate game would be a bar graph.  You may choose to graph the results by player – you can play too, or by state.
• Build their basic algebraic skills.  Talk about the ratio of miles per hour, miles per minute and how to compute gas mileage.  On some maps the exits are indicated by “mile markers” so you can teach your children how to figure out the answer to “how long will it take,” based upon the rate of speed you are traveling.

The math games will help to teach your children that math is fun and it is all around us.  As you travel the games will help keep your children occupied as they earn “spending money” for the next rest stop.