Math Activities
Children and even teenagers often do not know how often math concepts occur in daily life. If they did have a greater appreciation of how practical math is on a daily basis, they would not complain so often how boring their math lessons are or how useless it is to learn some particularly abstract math idea. One way to help kids make that connection between real life and math ideas is to look for activities you can do with the kids that will put those math ideas to work in an active way. If you can pull off the activity and make it fun and fascinating, you will see the look of amazement when you reveal that they just learned or used an important math concept in a very real way.
Many math concepts like set theory, volume, weight and relative sizes can be easily demonstrated with real life comparisons. Weight can be quickly understood by simply putting four or five items of similar size on the table and playing "guess the weight" for each one. After the kids try with varying digress of success to figure out the relative weights, a scale can reveal the actual weights. If you as the master of ceremonies of the game then demonstrate some math aptitude by discussing the weights in relative terms (percentage of weights, weight to size ratios, etc.), the kids will admire your ability to compute those values and a stimulating math discussion can occur because suddenly math became very real.
Many games are also great math exercises. In fact, with a little internet research, you can find many games that you can introduce simply for the fun of it only to reveal much later that the game called for the kids to use applied mathematics to do well with that game. Other games where number relationships are important such as Sudoku and Yahtzee call up on the kids to learn to compute math answers in their heads and learn to appreciate math based relationships naturally and easily. The important thing is to point out how the family play time exercised math ideas and it was great fun.
By being alert to learning circumstances in real life, you can ask your children to participate in impromptu math exercises based on something you encountered together. Many geometry ideas come about easily when you observe in nature triangles and other geometric shapes and how those shapes influence the usefulness of the item. Kids will even take notice when you compute the tip in a restaurant in your head because you know the formula for figuring out 10% or 15% (or whatever you tip) of the bill to compute the tip. They will want that skill themselves and that turns a dinner out into math homework time.
