How to Help Your Second Grader At Home
Math- Number Sense Activities:
- Continue to count objects and actions: How many times can you jump rope? How many people are in the line at the movies? How many toys can you find under your bed? How many blue cars are in this parking lot? How many red cars? (Don’t forget zero.)
- Make counting a game by estimating first. Then ask your child to count to see whose estimate is closest.
- Ask number riddles, such as these:
- What number comes after 1000?
- What numbers are greater than 12 but less than 25?
- What’s the largest number you can make with the digits 4, 6, and 8?
- Show your own interest in numbers by pointing out interesting numbers and their uses in your daily life. Talk about how you use numbers. When you are keeping track of prices at the grocery store, do you estimate or do you calculate? How about when you’re keeping track of a football score?
- Count backwards. You may be surprised at how challenging this can be. (Quick, count back from 500 million!) Counting backwards is more than a trick. Among other things, it is the basis for subtraction. Here are some ways to fit this activity into your day:
- Will the school bus come before your second grader can count back from 100?
- If you can stand it (and you probably can’t), let your child sing “99 Bottles of Soda on the Wall,” starting with 999.
- Draw a dot-to-dot pattern on the back of your place mat at a restaurant. Number the dots with a series of numbers that will challenge your child: 30 to 60 or 375 to 400 or 1,000 to 1,050, for example. Have your child complete the picture. Then challenge him/her to create a similar dot-to-dot puzzle for you.
- Pick a number between 0 and 10. Invite your child to guess the number. With each guess, tell him/her whether your number is less than or greater than his/her guess. For example, if your number is 8 and he/she guesses 2, you say, “No, it is greater than 2.” Keep track of the number of guesses your child takes and challenge him/her to beat his/her record in the next round. You can play this game using any set of numbers, as long as your child is comfortable with the counting range.
- “Get in that bathtub before I count to ten!” Sound familiar? Any time you find yourself counting to get something done- bedtime, chore time, putting-shoes-on time- skip-count instead. Each time your child hears you count by threes, fives, twenties, or hundreds, he/she is learning about number patterns.
- Use ordinal numbers. Hang a calendar in your child’s room, and talk about the days: “Today is June sixth” or “Casey’s party is on March sixteenth.” Be aware of using ordinal numbers in daily conversation: “Who is second in your team’s lineup?” and “Which errand do you want to do first? What do you want to do second?” Ask questions involving ordinal numbers: “What is the ninth letter of the alphabet?”
- Whenever you are counting change, demonstrate skip-counting. Encourage your child to count pennies by twos, nickels by fives, and dimes by tens.
- Talk about the words “even” and “odd.” Ask if numbers you run into are even or odd. If necessary, give you second grader this tip: “If the number ends in 0,2,4,6, or 8, if it even. If it ends in 1,3,5,7, or 9, it is odd.” If your child has a hard time remembering the numbers 0,2,4,6, and 8, you might show him/her this trick: “Take the number 6. Try to use your fingers to make 6 so that you show the same number of fingers on each hand. If you can, the number is even.”
- Play board games. They guarantee involvement with Mom or Dad. Any board game in which the players move ahead by tossing a die or turning a spinner gives practice in counting forward, a precursor to the addition strategy of “adding on.” Some commercial games are particularly well suited to reinforcing number sense. Here are just a few:
BattleshipCard Games of any Sort
CheckersChess
Chinese CheckersMancala
ParcheesiTangrams
UnoYahtzee
- Waiting for your food at a restaurant? Play Count Up, using twenty sugar packets or toothpicks. Tell your child that you will take turns placing one or two sugar packets on the table. The person who places the last sugar packet is the winner. As your child becomes more comfortable with this game, you can try it without sugar packets (an easier version for the car). Count from 1 to 20, taking turns counting one or two numbers. For example, your child may start with 1; you say 2, 3; he says 4, 5; you say 6; and so on. The person who says 20 wins. For this version, you can use any spread of numbers, such as 44 to 64 or 725 to 745.
- Teach your child to play solitaire. It reinforces sequencing as well as strategy skills.
- Read aloud books about basic number concepts. New counting books are published each year that reinforce number concepts and counting skills in new ways. Here are some particular good choices:
Anno’s Math Games, by Anno Mitsumasa (Philomel)
How Many Stars in the Sky?, by Lenny Hort (Tambourine)
How Much Is a Million?,by David Schwartz (Scholastic)
A Million Fish...More or Less, by Patricia McKissack (Knopf)
Two Ways to Count to Ten: A Librarian Folktale, by Ruby Dee (Holt)
When Sheep Cannot Sleep, by Satoshi Kitamura (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)