Developing Math Minds

Casual conversations including math concepts promotes application and comprehension. Students who can apply math skills that they know to the world around them have truly mastered the concept. Develop this habit so it becomes a natural part of your day. Below are examples of easy conversation starters.

What is the difference between the sizes of drinking glasses, plates and bowls in the kitchen. Estimate and measure their size.
Observe and talk about customary and metric measurements on food labels.
Practice measuring with water or flour using measuring cups and a kitchen scale. Convert between the two measurement scales.
Discuss temperature and the time it takes to freeze or boil something.
Wonder and measure the size of trees, the home or how long the street can be.
Measure rugs and windows and beds. Find the area of each.
Speed on a street or highway.
Unit rates in a grocery store.
Distance to a place they want to go.

Talk about simple everyday measurements to develop a real world sense of size.

Add random coin values by writing the values in decimal form. .01 .05 .50 etc.
Round prices to ones or tens in stores.
Measure yourself and your student in centimeters and convert it to meters.
Show children receipts from food stores and restaurants.
Quiz children on conversion between fractions and decimals.
Ask children to wonder why some stores use .99 and some use .87 after the whole number.
Discuss star ratings and how a place got a score like 4.3 or 2.5.

Talk about owing money and relate it to negative numbers.
Ask children to give numbers to the Lobby Level, Lower Lobby Level, or Parking Levels when taking an elevator or stairs.
Use pool time or beach days to talk about integers.
Use mall or neighborhood maps to talk about directions.
Chart grades or their growth. Ask their pediatrician to show the child their growth chart.

Find patterns everywhere! Leaves on trees or flowers on a plant. Wallpaper, people wearing a certain color in church. Kids with the same name in different grades.
While sitting at a red light, count how many cars make it through each day.
How many days does it take to get to the end of a gallon of milk.
Count the color groups in a package of Skittles or M&Ms. Count them each time.
How many different outfits can you make from 7 clothing articles?
Find the mean, median and mode of the monthly grocery spending, grades, gas fill-up.
Find the measure of center on anything your child is interested in, i.e. basketball points per games, batting average, gymnastic scores.