Playing games with your kids such as dominoes, UNO™ or Monopoly™ is a great way for them to develop their mental math with the added motivation of competition. Playing games is a great way for kids to learn; if they are enjoying the activity then they will practice more and will gain a longer attention span.

Have your child take up an entrepreneurial activity such as selling Girl Scout cookies or organising a lemonade stand. This gives them the opportunity to take responsibility for keeping track of the cost of their products, their selling price and how many products they need to sell to make a profit or to break even.

Playing number guessing games is an ideal way to turn mental math into a fun puzzle. For example, get them to guess a number that you’re thinking of, give parameters, such as it is between 1 and 100, it is an odd number, and it is the product of 7 x7.

Use dice to teach probability and to do mental addition. For a challenge use two dice and ask them whether you are more likely to roll a 2 or a 12. You could list all of the possible combinations on a piece of paper to make it easier for them to work at.

Cook and read recipes with your child. Cooking is a great way to show kids how you can use math in everyday scenarios and it is also a useful skill. Practice fractions by using measuring cups. Double or half your recipe and ask them to calculate the correct measurements. Let them set the table and use multiplication to calculate how many utensils they will need altogether (3 family members x 3 utensils each).

Taking your child shopping presents many opportunities for practicing math skills. Suggest that they keep track of your shopping as you go along and work out the total for you. They could practice their percentages by working out how much items cost after a sale reduction of 60% etc. For older children you could challenge them to calculate what the change should be before the cashier hands it over.

Educational online learning games are a fun way for children to learn. Find out what educational online programs your child’s school uses and see if there is any software for home use that you could download. Some kid’s online games are free while you pay a subscription for others. Benefits of paid sites are that they are monitored and safe, they will not bombard your child with advertisements and the content will usually be of a higher quality and updated more regularly. When you have confidence in the safety of a site you will be happier leaving kids to play unsupervised.