When helping your child with their math homework are you confused by coordinates, perplexed by primes, or just can’t remember how many sides a hexagon has? Don’t worry most of us are. All you need is a quick refresher!
How many of these questions can you answer? (Answers at the bottom of the page)
1) An isosceles triangle is:
a. a triangle that has sides of different lengths and 3 different angles
b. a triangle that has 2 sides of the same length and 2 angles of the same size
c. a four-sided shape with 1 pair of sides parallel and the other pair of sides not parallel
2) One of these shapes is not a quadrilateral:
a. a trapezoid
b. a parallelogram
c. a circle
3) Which of the following sequences is made up of natural numbers?
a. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
b. 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17
c. 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16
Fun Facts - Did you know?
- a dodecahedron is a solid 3-D shape with 12 faces made by joining together 12 regular pentagons
- a googol is a very large number – a 1 with one hundred zeros after it
- a polyomino is a plane shape made of squares of the same size, with each square connected to at least one of the others by a common edge
Hints and Tips
If your child asks you “what’s absolute value?” - tell them it’s how far a number is from zero on a number line, on either side of 0? When they ask you “what’s tessellation?” let them know it’s a group of identical shapes in a repeating pattern, with no overlapping or gaps between them, similar to mosaic tile? Or if they ask you to describe a Venn diagram show them it’s a diagram used for sorting things into sets, showing how the sets are related to one another?
Share your stories of helping your children with their math homework and you could win a copy of DK’s Math Dictionary: Homework Help for Families. Post your comments by Sunday, August 2nd. Gather will draw one respondent to win.
Answers to multiple choice questions: 1) b, 2) c, 3) a
One entry per person who comments on this post. No purchase necessary. See official rules.
recommend
Facebook
Twitter
bookmark 
email
print
Comments: 29
A great book, and opportunity for families!
That night as he was getting ready for bed, he was all excited and asked me to come into his room. He has a star-shaped Snoopy rug on his floor. He said to me, "The rug has 1-2-3-4-5 arms." He folded 2 of the arms onto the center and said, "You take away 2 and you have 1-2-3!"
The result is I don't really know much about math. My son is a mathematical genius and my daughter is following in his footsteps. I help them with English, science, social studies and every other aspect of their homework. Math remains a challenge and my children are already better at it than I am. Thankfully their father is also a mathematical wizard, so they turn to him for help. I want to be able to stand my ground in this number-friendly family so I can start helping my kids with their homework, too :)
My son is only entering 1st grade, and he was just introduced to simple math last year. Although we had been practicing some addition at home, my son kept coming home with lots of mistakes on the subtraction.
I decided to figure out why he had all of these mistakes, and it turned out that he had no idea how to do subtraction, he was just guessing.
After an afternoon where I tried to do subtraction with him by using blueberries, apples and everything else I could find, he finally understood what subtraction was all about and the next day he returned home with all of his school work correct.
Subtraction was simple for me, but I really fear the day that he will bring home work that I do not understand.
As they got a bit older we gave them change in their piggy banks. We would take them out once a week to count the change. They learned to distinguish the pennies from the dimes and such. They also learned to count.
Like April said in the first comment, the home is filled with opportunities to teach the skills a child will need to do math. I am thankful that we as parents knew to teach them at home before they ever attended school.
Math is so important to an adults life they must learn it as a child. My grand-kids are already learning important steps and tactics to world of math as they encounter it in their lives.
I try to help my son with his math homework but I'm not the best teacher. I'm not good at explaining things I don't understand. It's frustrating for both of us when we are working on homework.
Having something to help me would be great.
Yay...I got the questions right!
When my kids were in elementary school, I had them do a 100 question timed math sheet every night. Depending on what level they were at, depended on what they had to do...addition, subtraction, mult. or division. By the end of 3rd grade, a student had to be able to do 100 problems in 5 minutes in add, sub, and mult. By the end of 4th grade, the students were suppose to do 100 division problems in 5 minutes. I worked and worked on speed and accuracy with my kids. It's just repetitive practice. I won't say they enjoyed it, but it did help both of them a lot. At the end of 3rd grade, Christopher beat the principal in the timed multiplication test.
Now, Christopher will be taking calculus this year...and I'll hlep him if I need to. I'm hoping I don't have to remember that much from over 20 yrs. ago. LOL. Angela has this new math curiculum that I just don't get. I should be able to understand this middle school math, but I don't. They aren't working problems that same way we use to work problems.
I'd also love to review this book and other like it on my book blogs:
A Book Blogger's Diary - Book Reviews and Giveaways (http://abookbloggersdiary.blogspot.com/)
A Bookworm Reads - Book News and Reviews
(http://abookwormreads.blogspot.com/)
Let me know.
abookblogger at gmail dot com