Subtracting the Negativity

All too often we hear students say “I hate math!” or “why do we have to learn this stuff, I’ll never use it!” when in reality everyone uses math every day.  So why does math have such a bad stigma around it and how can we, as teachers, change this?  Kids need to be shown that math can be fun, it is used in the real world and that with a positive attitude it may not be as hard as they thought. 

It is obvious that math topics build of each other, you can’t add unless you are able to count, you can’t find area without being able to multiply.  Therefore, kids need build a strong foundation early on to succeed in the future.  Unfortunately the whole school day can’t be spent on one subject, but luckily for math it can be incorporated almost everywhere.  For example, for kids learning to count, count to ten jumping jacks in gym class. 

There are plenty of kid friendly sites that can show examples of real world math problems;  Math Playground has problems for grades 1-6 of varying difficulty.   To make things more fun the same website also has games that don’t seem like math but stimulate the logical part of the brain, the same part that helps us build math skills.  Factory Balls asks players to recreate the design on the ball using different color pants and tools.  To succeed one must paint the ball in a specific order, much like an equation must be completed by order of operations. 

There are many creative ways to make math exciting and with the right activities we can work to erase the negativity surrounding math!