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6 Math Enrichment Activities to Keep Math Skills Sharp

It’s crucial to keep your eyes on your children’s math performance during a school year and holidays alike. For this purpose, homeschoolers and teachers implement math enrichment activities in the studying process to keep children in shape.

As a parent, you can help your kid with such activities. What is math enrichment and what budget-friendly activities and online math enrichment programs to choose? Keep reading to find the answers.

What Is a Math Enrichment Class?

Many math enrichment programs speed up the curriculum and add a few more topics. Usually, only top performing students can keep up with a rushed math program. Math enrichment activities shouldn’t contain:

• Just more similar tasks.
• Overly difficult tasks.
• Tasks of a higher academic level.

On the other hand, a true math enrichment class makes math clearer and more meaningful for students, fostering them to study this subject better.

Math enrichment activities expand students’ understanding of math topics through engaging STEM projects, real-world applications, and more.

6 Math Enrichment Activities

Check these six engaging math enrichment activities:

#1 Temperature Unit Practice

It’s high time to learn speed, mass, temperature, and length once your kid enrolls in the first grade. At this point, you can come up with a few captivating measurement activities to enrich your child’s understanding of temperature:

• Heating and cooling water. Give your child a thermometer and let them measure the water’s temperature in their tea or soda cups. Let them catch the boiling and freezing points under your supervision.
• Let your children measure the temperature outside – under the sun and in the shadows. Later, kids can calculate these temperatures’ differences.

These activities will help your child get better at measurements and increase their awareness of nature.

#2 12 Times Table

Children should learn the multiplication table by heart by the end of the third grade. However, kids will benefit from learning multiplication facts to 12 as well. These two extra lines in the multiplication table will help children measure inches, feet, and yards. Most importantly, kids will be able to convert between imperial and metric units more smoothly.

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.

#3 Exponential Growth Practice

Children might be uneasy with algebra and exponential growth in particular. Yet, you can make this topic way more captivating with these activities:

Investing Money

People become rich because they apply exponential growth laws to their incomes. It’s an excellent chance for your child to learn this algebra topic and understand how investments work. Let them calculate imaginary investment growth if they put money in different banks and buy stocks of various companies.

Ask them to determine bank interest rates and the projected growth of some prominent companies – Google, Instagram, Facebook, Apple, etc.

Afterward, let your child determine how rich they will become in 10, 15, and 20 years if they invest one thousand, ten thousand, or one hundred thousand dollars.

Growing Bacteria

Bacteria grow exponentially, and it’s an excellent chance to explain algebra using real-world examples. For this activity you will need:

• A microscope.
• A few Petri dishes.
• A few cotton swabs.
• An agar solution.

Prepare an agar solution. Mix agar powder with hot water and steer until it becomes a uniform solution. Boil it for a few minutes, let it cool, and fill the Petri dishes.

Your child needs to collect some dirt under the toilet’s seat, around a doorknob, from a dry puddle, or somewhere else using a cotton swab. Afterward, they should place the dirty cotton swabs in the Petri dishes and wait. Thus, kids can check how bacteria multiply in real time.

#4 Budgeting One Million Dollars

What if you had one million dollars? Budgeting is one of the best 3rd-grade math enrichment projects. You can make dreams about one million dollars a budgeting practice to strengthen your children’s numeric fluency. Let them:

• Calculate how much money they spend in a day. From that point, children can determine monthly and yearly expenses. For instance, your child spends $100 a day. It means they spend $3,000 per month and $36,000 per year. In its turn, 1,000,000 ÷ 36,000 = 27.7 years. It means an average person can live off one million dollars in 27 years.
• Calculate how many houses, cars, toys, or whatever they can buy to spend one million dollars.

#5 Numeric Enrichment: Math Board Games

Board games help children strengthen fundamental math skills – counting, addition, subtraction, etc. Kids can refine their math skills by counting turns, throwing the dice, summing up card values, and more.

#6 Water Balloons Challenge

Kids often feel uncomfortable solving math equations after three months of holidays without even touching a math book. However, you can help your kid practice math in summer with a fun water balloon challenge. Here is the point:

Draw equations on water-filled balloons, like 3+5 or 7-3. Then, draw answers to these equations on the floor in the backyard. Let your children pick the balloons with equations and throw them at the correct answers on the floor.

Draw answers in squares far away from each other so that kids can easily throw balloons at the correct spots. For this, you need:

• Twenty balloons.
• Water.
• A waterproof marker.
• Crayons.
• Storage for filled balloons: a cardboard box will make it.

The Bottom Line

A math enrichment curriculum isn’t about giving your child more overly complicated math exercises. It’s about increasing their understanding of mathematics and refining their numeric skills. You can use some of these six math enrichment activities to help your child understand numbers with fun. You might question yourself: “What about math enrichment programs near me? Should I search for them?”

If you search for math enrichment websites and programs, you’re already in the right place. You can enroll your children in Brighterly’s online math courses to enhance their math skills in one-to-one classes with professional tutors.