Helping With Math at Home

The French Immersion program is great since learning a second (or more!) language is a great thing for kids, and opens up opportunities for travel, education and careers later on down the road. Part of that immersion is, obviously, time. Math is an area that really suffers due to this time crunch. Students in FI simply don't get the same time that students outside do. If a student is struggling with some concepts or math or has some gaps from previous years, it can be a struggle to make up that time.

Here are some ideas for working at home with your child to help address that time loss or to fill gaps. They are in order of use (as determined by me!).

Often, the biggest issue for a grade 5 student comes down to number sense and their ability to work with numbers quickly. If this piece is lacking, it can slow down everything else and makes problem solving in any strand really difficuly. Often, students have strategies that have worked in previous grades, but they don't work anymore with the larger numbers. An example would be a problem like, "Sam picks up 5 leaves on his way to school each day and keeps them in his locker. At the end of the week, how many leaves are there?". A kid can use the counting by strategy to simply count 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 to get the answer. They don't really multiply at all. A grade 5 question might have 44 leaves per day over 17 days, and suddenly the idea of counting 44, 88... 17 times isn't so appealing.

So, this next list is to help build number sense specifically.