The secret to kiddos doing math WILLINGLY

Recently, I’ve been having multiple conversations with parents who are at their wits end with their kiddos who do not want to practice math other than completing their assigned homework. Interestingly, when I work with the same kiddos in small group sessions, there is little to not resistance to complete extra practice problems. In fact, most kiddos are pretty excited to solve the problems that I give them.

So does that mean that I’ve discovered the secret to have their kiddos do math with me AND not complain about it?!

Well, no. But I will share something that helps my students be less resistant to work on math. I’m not their parent, grandparent, older sibling or sometimes even younger more accelerated sibling. I’m a random stranger that builds a rapport with the kiddo over time. My role as a tutor is different from the aforementioned people’s roles in the students’ lives. My role is even very different from a teacher’s role in a students’ life.

But more than that, I spend a lot of time thinking about how I can help my students be more confident in math.

Story time again!

When I was in graduate school for secondary education, I had to observe teachers for 100 hours or more. While 100 hours doesn’t sound like a lot, each class period is about 45 minutes and most teachers only teach 6 periods daily. That’s a total of 4.5 hours a day, and listening to the same teacher teach the same lesson all day gets pretty boring after the second or third lesson. Basically, I’ve observed A LOT of teachers.

One teacher really caught my attention. She worked at a local private school and was very non-traditional in her teaching style. She ordered multiple whiteboards to be hung all over her classroom. Imagine every space on the wall at eye level had a whiteboard. And everyday at one point during the lesson, she had her kiddos grab a dry erase marker and walk up to the board. I’ll never forget how excited the kiddos were in December to still go to the whiteboards and solve basic math problems.

I knew that this was something I wanted to incorporate into my classrooms when I was a public school teacher, but was never able to get the funds I needed. Well, now that I’ve got my own school and my own schools’ funds I have the ability to live out my dream! The kiddos come in weekly and beg to use the whiteboards to solve order of operations problems.

I guess maybe I am onto something.

Maybe it’s the fact that they get to stand.

Maybe it’s because they view it as a treat.

Maybe it’s because I’m not mom or dad.

Maybe it’s because they take on the teacher persona.

Or maybe because it’s just fun.

I don’t know why, but I do know that a lot of happy kiddos do math willingly with me when they stand in front of those whiteboards. Here are the whiteboards that I use in case you’d like to have some dedicated space in your house for math!