How to Help your Kids with Math (Pre-K to Grade 3)

Featuring the Best Math Websites, Apps, Software, Workbooks, and Books

How can parents help their children with math at home? There are lots of different approaches you can take to help your kids develop their math skills. You can use software packages, apps, workbooks, books, videogames, and websites, just to name a few things. So to try to help you out a bit, we have gathered up the best of all sorts of different kinds of math resources that are out there and checked out all the reviews to pick out the very best stuff.  If you have something that you have used to help your kids with math, let us know we would love to know about it.

 

*If you are looking for math resources for older kids, check out our post for math help for kids in grades 4-6.

The Best Free Websites with Math Games

There are lots of sites where you can play free math games that are fun and help reinforce concepts the child has already learned. The following sites are our top four:

• Funbrain Everyone loves this site. It’s the #1 site for online educational games for kids of all ages. It has good graphics, easy navigation, free educational games, online books, and comics that develop skills in math, reading, and literacy.
• Houghton Mifflin Kids’ Place Math Houghton Mifflin is a company that publishes textbooks, reference works, fiction, non-fiction, and educational software and videos, and this site is their interactive math resource that is great for math practice.
• Math Cats is another of our favorite math sites. This site has no advertising and features lots of open-ended math activities.
• Jumpstart is an excellent free resource for online math games. No ads, great graphics, and fun games from one of the educational software’s most well-known brands.
• Skoolbo is another interesting free site to have a look at. The site “is the world’s largest educational game ever! Skoolbo is a literacy and numeracy program with more than 50,000 questions designed to assist 4 to 10-year-olds in their journey to mastery of essential reading and mathematics skills.”

Best Math App

If you want a fantastic math app for your kids, get Park Math. This is the best math app that we have come across so far.

The reviews for this app are excellent, it won 2011 Parents’ Choice Silver Award winner from the Parents’ Choice Foundation, 2010 Best Kids’ iPhone/iPod App of the Year Award from iLounge and it also got a Children’s Technology Review Editor’s Choice Award for Excellence in Design. In a review of Park Math on GiggleApps, they say, “This app helps kids ages 1-6 explore math concepts in a way that is bright and cheerful and above all else, never seems like work. I am impressed with how content-rich the app is, having seven activities to choose from as well as two levels of difficulty, all with a lovely theme of animals having fun, playing at a park. Recently, an iPad version, Park Math HD, has been released, which also includes a 3rd level as well.”

Websites with Math Lessons/Curriculum

There are several websites with really great math curriculum lessons that you can try out for free (before committing to a subscription). We’ve narrowed it down to our five favorites, they are:

• IXL Math is a math practice site with 2,000 skills covering junior kindergarten to grade 10, and an unlimited number of computer-generated problems that adapt to your child’s ability, increasing in difficulty as they improve. It also offers immediate feedback and question-specific explanations to solidify understanding of each concept. Parents get weekly e-mail updates on the child’s progress. The child can earn awards and certificates as they reach important milestones. The curriculum can be tailored for the U.S, Canada, Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, and the U.K. Cost– $9.95/month or $79/year, or they allow you to complete up to 20 questions per day for free.

• Dreambox Learning is an online program designed for ages 5-8 that has educational games that are individualized for students, adapting the curriculum just for them. My daughter uses Dreambox and enjoys using it. Cost– $12.95/month or $59.95/6 months, and they also offer a two-week free trial.

• K5 Learning is a multi-award winning online afterschool study program for kids in kindergarten to grade 5 that uses adaptive technology to help kids develop instant recall of basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division facts. Progress on every math fact is monitored until mastery is obtained. Cost-Monthly subscription First child $25 additional children $15 annual subscription first child $199 additional children $129. The site also offers a 14-day free trial.

• Time4Learning for homeschool, afterschool, and summer skill sharpening, Time4Learning’s award-winning pre k to eighth-grade curriculum combines the technology kids love with the education they need to make learning fun. Cost $19.95/month for the first child and $14.95/month for each additional child.

• Maths-Whizz from the U.K is an award-winning online’ math tutor’ that uses interactive animations and tutoring methods to deliver measurable results. Includes math resources and math games for kids. Maths-Whizz is aligned to national maths curricula across the world. Cost -$19.99 per month, per child, or try the free trial.

Best Math Book for Kids ages 5+

When researching this post, we came across this book that looks to be an excellent resource for teaching kids math at home.

Family Math has over 300 pages of lively activities that use easy instructions, and simple objects such as beans, blocks, pennies, buttons, and string, parents, and kids solve problems together. It’s recommended for families with children five to twelve years old

The Best Math Workbooks

If you are looking for workbooks, a great company to check out is School Zone.

You’ve probably seen these workbooks around if you have spent any time looking for workbooks because they are sold everywhere. What you might not know is that they offer the workbooks in different forms, as well as the hardcopy books that you can easily buy in stores, you can get the software with interactive workbooks or workbooks in app form.