Have you ever visited a supermarket during rush hours and found it difficult to calculate the best deal or approximate bill value mentally to ensure the amount falls within the budget? Or did you find it challenging to calculate how much longer you need to wait for your next big pay raise? These are just a few of the real-life situations that demand an excellent grasp of mental math abilities. Contrary to the widely believed misconception, mental math isn’t just another academic subject that should be memorized to clear examinations with flying colors.
At Delhi Public School Sushant Lok, one of the Top 10 Schools in Gurugram, we believe mental math is an invaluable life skill with a multitude of cognitive and practical advantages. Beyond mere number crunching, mental math empowers students by nurturing their logical reasoning, problem-solving, and concentration abilities, laying a robust foundation for academic and professional success. While there are numerous benefits of developing mental math muscles, only a few kids succeed in honing this skill. To make things easier and help more kids become mental math wizards, we have shared some of the best, practical, and effective tips you can start practicing with your kids. So, let’s explore the tips shared below.
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Teach Patterns and Shortcuts
While there are numerous ways to foster and sharpen mental math abilities in children, we recommend teaching patterns and shortcuts. It will equip children with relevant mental math strategies that simplify calculations and significantly improve their problem-solving abilities. This tip is useful because once kids learn to identify patterns in numbers, they can easily break complex problems into manageable chunks, reducing mental strain.
An example of pattern recognition includes identifying a pattern while multiplying a number by 5. Besides pattern identification, students can also learn some shortcuts typically taught in Vedic mathematics to become better at mental math. This tip will sharpen their number sense and mental agility, eventually transforming them into mental math wizards.
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Incorporate Real-Life Scenarios
It is one of our favorite and highly recommended tips for raising mental math wizards. We at Delhi Public School Sushant Lok have observed that incorporating real-life scenarios into regular mental math practice can make learning more engaging and relatable for children. Instead of giving them abstract calculations, present the math problems in contexts they encounter daily. For example, give them Rs.100 and ask them if they want to buy their favorite snack within Rs.50 and reserve Rs.30 for an impulsive buy; how much money would they be left with?
Such exercises will make the kids more interested in practicing mental math, and they will gradually become great at it. Similar examples can also be followed to teach them how to estimate travel time based on distance and speed, calculate sale prices, split a pizza into equal sizes, etc.
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Emphasize Number Sense
If you’re new to the concept of emphasizing number size, it is about nurturing the child’s intuitive understanding of numbers, their relationships, and magnitudes. Regular number sense practice will sharpen the child’s mental math abilities, making them more efficient and faster. For example, if a child understands that 199 is closer to 200, then s/he can start estimating approximate solutions mentally.
As a parent, you can begin by encouraging your kids to break numbers into familiar chunks and then recognize patterns to foster a better number sense in them. You can start strengthening their number sense by asking questions like ‘Is 673 closer to 600 or 700,’ ‘Which is greater, 2/3 or 3/4?’ and other similar questions. Such questions will improve the child’s ability to visualize and manipulate quantities abstractly.
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Use Mnemonics and Memory Aids
Another powerful technique to improve your kids’ mental math abilities is introducing them to mnemonics and mental aids from a young age. This powerful technique is focused on helping kids learn mathematical formulas, facts, and procedures more effectively. For the uninitiated, mnemonics are memory tools that encode information into rhymes, acronyms, and associations, making it easier to recall.
It is why maths in younger sections is taught mostly through this method. And memory aids are like visualization tricks that aid retention. Sticking to these strategies will fortify your child’s long-term memory of fundamental mathematical concepts, freeing up much of their cognitive resources for more complex mental calculations.
Conclusion
We at Delhi Public School Sushant Lok, one of the top 10 CBSE schools in Delhi NCR, have always been an advocate of teaching valuable skills to children that will pay off in the long run, and mental math is one such skill. If you can implement all the tips discussed in this article, we are sure you’ll be successfully able to inculcate and strengthen your kid’s mental math abilities. It will gradually unlock a new world of cognitive advantages for them.
While the benefits of mastering mental math are innumerable, we would like to highlight that developing mental math prowess is not a destination but a continuous journey focused on nurturing curiosity, a growth mindset, and perseverance. Having said that, we would like to urge the parents to remain patient instead of looking for immediate and faster results. Developing strong mental math abilities takes time but if your approach remains right, success is sure shot!