6 Math Enrichment Activities to Keep Math Skills Sharp
Updated on May 7, 2024
Monitoring your children’s mathematical progress throughout the school year and during vacations is essential. So, math enrichment activities are an excellent way for homeschoolers and instructors to help youngsters stay active as they learn.
As a parent, you can help your kid with such activities. But what is math enrichment, and how can you find affordable programs and activities online?
Keep reading to find the answers.
What Is a Math Enrichment Class?
Accelerated learning and adding new concepts are hallmarks of many math enrichment programs. Usually, only top-performing students can keep up with a rushed math program. What should not be included in math enrichment ideas are:
- Just more similar tasks.
- Overly difficult tasks.
- Tasks of a higher academic level.
1:1 Math Lessons
Want to raise a genius? Start
learning Math with Brighterly
Let's start learning Math!
In contrast, students benefit significantly from an actual math enrichment program since it helps them understand and apply mathematical concepts in relevant ways. Through interesting STEM projects, practical applications, and other means, math enrichment activities deepen students’ grasp of mathematical concepts.
6 Math Enrichment Activities
Check these six engaging math enrichment activities:
#1 Temperature Unit Practice
The first grade is the perfect moment to introduce your child to length, mass, speed, and temperature concepts. Some enjoyable measuring activities that will help your youngster understand temperature better include:
- Heating and cooling water. Ensure your little one has access to a thermometer so students can check the water temperature in their favorite cups. While you watch, let them reach the boiling and freezing points.
- Let your children measure the temperature outside. Take your kids outdoors to discover how hot or cold it is in the sunlight and shade. Later, kids can calculate these temperature differences.
These exercises will improve your child’s measuring skills and appreciation for nature.
#2 12 Times Table
After third grade, students must know how to memorize multiplication tables fast. On the other hand, knowing how to multiply numbers up to 12 is helpful for children. A good understanding of the multiplication table will assist youngsters in learning the conversion between inches, feet, and yards. The most critical benefit is that children will have an easier time converting between metric and imperial measurements.
Check a few activities to learn the 12 times table besides regular memorizing:
- Listening to multiplication table audiobooks.
- Playing multiplication math games.
- Listening to multiplication songs.
- Memorizing 12 times tables using colorful flashcards.
1:1 Math Lessons
Want to raise a genius? Start
learning Math with Brighterly
Let's start learning Math!
#3 Exponential Growth Practice
Algebra, and an exponential expansion, in particular, may be challenging for children. But the following activities will make the subject much more interesting:
One way that people amass wealth is by using the rules of exponential growth to their income. This math enrichment program is an excellent opportunity for your youngster to gain knowledge of mathematics and insight into finance. Help students figure out hypothetical investment growth where they put their money in different banks.
Ask them about their predictions for the future of Google, Instagram, Facebook, Apple, and other well-known corporations and interest rates at local banks.
The next step is to have your kid calculate the expected rate of return on an investment of $1,000, $10,000, or $100,000 over the next 10, 15, and 20 years.
Growing Bacteria
The exponential growth rate of bacteria provides an excellent opportunity to illustrate mathematics with practical examples. To complete this task, you’ll require:
- A microscope.
- A few Petri dishes.
- A few cotton swabs.
- An agar solution.
Prepare an agar solution. Mix the agar powder into the boiling water until a smooth mixture is formed. Fill the Petri dishes after boiling and cooling.
Gather some dirt with a cotton swab from under the toilet seat, around a doorknob, from a dry puddle, etc. Afterward, they place the dirty cotton swabs in the Petri dishes and wait. This enrichment in math activity allows children to see the growth and multiplication of bacteria in real-time.
#4 Budgeting One Million Dollars
Where would you be if you had a million dollars? Creating a budget is one of the top enrichment activities for math in third grade. To help your kids get more comfortable with numbers, you may turn their budgeting aspirations into a game about a million dollars. Permit them to:
- Calculate how much money they spend in a day. At that point, kids can figure out how much money they’ll need each month and year. As an example, your kid spends about $100 daily. The result implies that they spend $36,000 yearly or $3,000 monthly. Help them do the math:1,000,000 ÷ 36,000 = 27.7 years. It indicates that a typical individual may sustain himself for 27 years with one million dollars.
- Calculate how many houses, cars, toys, or whatever they can buy to spend one million dollars.
#5 Numeric Enrichment: Math Board Games
Kids can improve their math skills by playing board games. They can practice counting, adding, and removing. Math enrichment games like counting by turns, rolling dice, and adding card values may help kids get better at math.
#6 Water Balloons Challenge
Three months of vacation without picking up a maths book might make kids uneasy when solving maths problems. But a water balloon challenge is one of the fun math enrichment activities for your kid to practice math. The main idea is this:
Use water-filled balloons to draw equations, such as 3+5 or 7-3. Then, draw answers to these equations on the floor in the backyard. Give your kids the task of finding the right solutions on the floor by picking out balloons containing equations.
Ensure the squares are wide enough to draw the answers so the youngsters can easily throw the balloons in the right places. Twenty balloons are required for this.
- Twenty balloons.
- Water.
- A waterproof marker.
- Crayons.
- Storage for filled balloons: a cardboard box will make it.
Conclusion
For the enrichment program for math, the goal is not to give your child more complex tasks on their own time. It’s all about making kids better at maths and understanding it.
The six maths enrichment activities in this article can help your child learn numbers in a fun and exciting way.
You might ask, “What about math enrichment programs near me?” Should I try to find them?”You’re in the right place if you’re looking for websites and programs that will help you improve your child’s maths skills. Brighterly has online math courses where your kids can work one-on-one with professional tutors to help them do well in maths.