Does your child have trouble sitting still and often lose focus while doing homework? Do they tend to daydream or play with erasers when faced with math exercises? Do they make careless mistakes when doing problems and struggle with basic calculations?
These are all signs of poor concentration, which can often affect a child’s ability to learn. So, as a parent, how can you help your child improve their focus when it has already been disrupted?
Tips for Practicing Concentration
Children are young and do not have a clear concept of time, so the first thing parents need to do is to change their children’s concept of time and adjust their study habits.
For example, parents can divide a learning task into several parts and distribute them to different time periods of the day. Let the children concentrate on studying for 20 minutes first, then take a full rest, and continue learning after recovering.
At the same time, parents can also give some positive psychological hints to let the children know that “it only takes 20 minutes to finish” and “you can play for 2 hours after finishing the homework”, and the children will not be so resistant.
Of course, in addition to this, some external forces are often needed to improve concentration, so here are a few more math games for training concentration.
01 Counting Stars
Requirements: Practice counting according to the prompts below.
① Count how many stars there are in total
② Count how many groups of stars there are in total (according to a group of 4 stars)
③ How many stars are left without grouping
Counting is a relatively basic training, similar to finding numbers in order.
02 Find Numbers
Question type 1: Find the “8” in each group of numbers below, circle it, and count how many there are.
No.1:
587618852487183508530819683754802816
There are ( ) 8 in total.
No.2:
1709830892698276082593608713781708257
There are ( ) 8 in total.
Question type 2: (Schulte grid training) In a table with 25 small squares, the numbers 1-25 are shuffled, please count from 1 to 25 at the fastest speed, while reading Circle it while the parent is timing it, the shorter the time the better.
There are many ways to play the Schulte grid. Parents can also erase one of the grids and let the children find the missing number.
After the child is more familiar with it, you can try the upgraded version of the mini-game to exercise your child’s computing ability.
03 Add “1” to the number
Requirement: Parents read out the following arrays, and let the children add “1” to each number. For example, 9210, after adding 1, it is 0321.
No.1:
Group A 5321, Group B 2980, Group C 7493
Group D 56218, Group E 46117, Group F 80679
No.2:
Group A 0530, Group B 3275, Group C 7584
Group D 27916, Group E 30871, Group F 746951
The same is to exercise addition, using dice can play a more advanced way, and at the same time train children’s calculation and reasoning abilities.
04 Roll the Dice
Question: As shown in the figure below, a dice with numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 on six sides can be placed in three different ways. What is the sum of the numbers on the three sides of the dice facing downward in the picture?
This kind of training method requires children to be familiar with dice first so that they can quickly calculate the number at the bottom.
The difficulty can be reduced at the beginning, and after the child is familiar with the gameplay, the difficulty of the game can be controlled by increasing or decreasing the number of dice, isn’t it also very interesting?
If you want to train multiplication, you will generally use the game of “dodging numbers”.
05 Dodge “3”
Requirement: Counting starts from 1. All numbers related to 3 and multiples of 3 cannot be spoken out. They should be expressed by clapping hands, such as 3, 6, 9, 12, 13, and so on.
Because the frequency of numbers related to 3 is relatively high, if you are not careful, you will be “trapped”, so children need to be highly focused when playing.
Of course, in addition to 3, parents can also change other numbers, such as hiding “7”. Although the related numbers do not appear frequently, children need to be very familiar with the multiples of 7, and the difficulty is relatively large.
Playing games not only allows children to understand mathematics while having fun, but also helps to stimulate children’s thinking ability, and cultivate interest in mathematics, and is also very useful for improving the concentration and accuracy of calculations.
Graduated from Columbia University in the United States and has rich practical experience in mathematics competitions’ teaching, including Math Kangaroo, AMC… He teaches students the ways to flexible thinking and quick thinking in sloving math questions, and he is good at inspiring and guiding students to think about mathematical problems and find solutions.