How to Improve Maths Skills in Children

If your child finds maths hard, the instinct is more practice. It is usually the wrong instinct, and the reason is worth understanding before you spend another evening on worksheets.

Almost every child who struggles with arithmetic is missing something underneath it. Not effort, and usually not ability: a feel for what numbers actually are. That feel is called number sense, it develops before and beneath calculation, and it predicts later maths achievement better than early arithmetic does.

What number sense means

You have it and you stopped noticing. It is knowing that seven is a bit more than six without counting, that 19 plus 19 is nearly 40, that if the answer came out as 300 when you expected 30 then something went wrong. It is the sense that lets you notice a wrong answer before you check it.

A child without it can still follow procedures, and will produce answers that are wildly wrong without flinching, because nothing in them says the answer looks odd.

How you build it

Not with worksheets. With quantities they can see and touch, and with talking.

Count real things constantly, and count them in different arrangements so they notice the number does not change when you move them about. Compare: which pile is bigger, how do you know, how many more. Estimate before counting, then count, so they meet the gap between guess and answer. Subitise, which is the useful word for recognising small quantities instantly without counting: dice, dominoes, fingers, cards.

Play games with a board and a die. Moving a counter along a numbered track is one of the most evidence-supported early maths activities there is, and it costs nothing.

Then, and only then, fluency

Once quantities mean something, number facts are worth automating. Not because recall is impressive, but because a child who has to work out six times seven has spent their working memory on it and has none left for the problem it appeared inside. Fluent facts free the mind for the actual maths.

Short and frequent beats long and occasional. Five minutes most days, out loud, in the car.

Maths anxiety, and where it comes from

Worth naming because it is common and largely inherited from adults. A parent who says "I was never any good at maths" hands a child a permission slip. So does timed testing, and so does correcting quickly rather than letting them find the error.

The single most useful sentence available to you is asking how they got there. It treats maths as reasoning rather than a right answer to be produced fast, and it tells you exactly where the misunderstanding sits.

Where it hides in an ordinary day

Cooking, which is fractions and ratio with a reason to get it right. Shopping, which is money, estimation and comparison. Journeys, which are time and distance. Building, which is measurement and shape. Games with scores. Sharing anything between people, which is division nobody has to be told is division.

A child who understands what numbers mean will pick up the procedures. A child who has only the procedures gets stuck the moment a question is phrased in an unfamiliar way.