Hi! Thanks for visiting my blog!
Welcome to this post! I hope you have a wonderful reading experience. I am Julia Park and I am an Early Childhood Education major! I am studying at Millersville University. If you have a moment, I would love it if you could check out my other blog posts! They include information about a variety of topics within the educational world.
My last post included information about parent involvement to benefit math instruction. In this post, I will be detailing activities that parents can do with their children at home to support their child’s learning.
Learning at Home During the Pandemic
I wanted to write this post to assist parents/families in supporting their children’s learning at home during the pandemic. I admire the strength of teachers and parents throughout this challenging time of transitioning to online learning. This time has emphasized even further that parent involvement, as I discussed in my previous post, is very important in their child’s education.
The following sections will focus on three specific activities parents can do with their children to extend their child’s learning at home.
Measurement Activity Ideas 
There are many ways to practice measuring at home. Measurement can be complicated for children because of the variety of units. It is very beneficial for children to make measurement activities hands-on and interactive to provide children with the opportunity to deepen their understanding of these particular concepts.
One way of helping children with their measurement skills at home is by providing them with opportunities to compare sizes between items around them. This is a simple activity that sparks discussions with children and allows them to practice their understanding that the objects in their surroundings have all kinds of attributes. Comparison words can include smaller, bigger, taller, longer, shorter, and many more!
Examples of objects children can use for comparison activities include shoes, silverware, books, pillows, water bottles, stuffed animals, other toys, and anything else around the house that you can find!
Another way to help children with their measurement skills outside of school is by having them measure items using nonstandard units. They can practice measuring with units before starting to use a ruler. Children can use string or even their own body to measure objects. They can compare the measurements they get to tie the last activity into this one as well.
When they start using rulers, the child can measure having the ruler lined up differently with objects. This will help students practice using units to measure instead of just seeing the number on the ruler where it meets the end of the object.
Read Aloud Activity Example
I discuss read-alouds more in-depth in my other blog post, but I wanted to include a specific example of one here.
Math activities do not have to involve a strict set of questions or problems for students to solve. Although practice like that is beneficial, read-alouds are just as helpful! They are super fun and engaging as well.
For example, the picture book in the image above promotes creative thinking skills rather than just memorization skills to practice math. The book contains amazing imagery, fun rhymes, and multiplication problems throughout the story.
Parents can perform a read-aloud with their children to review multiplication concepts and engage in mathematical discussions. Children’s comfort levels can increase when working with math as well because they are practicing math in a low-stress environment.
This is just one example of how you can use a book to extend a child’s learning in math! The website embedded in the image has so many other wonderful books and ideas you can use for a variety of ages to assist children with their math at home!
Math Walk Activity
A math walk is a creative way for children to practice their mathematical skills. They can explore the ground to figure out solutions to a variety of problems or questions.
I love that these activities involve movement. Movement strengthens a child’s learning, increases their motivation, and improves their memorization skills. Children can move around to take in all aspects of the information displayed on the ground. They can also participate in a series of math walks where they go from one problem or question to another.
Math walks are also awesome for students who need visuals to provide them with extra support. There can be diagrams, patterns, timelines, shapes, different colors, and so much more to make these as interactive and supportive for the child as they can be!
Click the image above for some amazing math walk ideas!
Thank you so much for reading!
I hope you enjoyed reading about activities parents can do at home to extend children’s learning! I had such a fun time writing about these interactive activities. Thank you for reading this post! Stay well!
-Julia 🙂