Advertisement feature in association with Eedi
Today I’ve teamed up with Eedi, the online maths support tool, to help you give your kids the confidence they need to thrive at maths. We’re also giving away a brand new iPad, so read on for more details!
I watched an interesting series of Instagram stories this morning from my friend Fritha all about maths. She was talking about the process of teaching her son, Wilf, maths at home and how it brought back traumatic memories of her own experiences of maths at school.
‘When Wilf started explaining the maths he is doing,’ said Fritha, ‘my head just said ‘I’m not good at this, I don’t understand.’ My brain just switches off and starts panicking. I was ‘top set’ throughout high school, largely because I had so many coping strategies to ensure I kept up, which involved lots of memorising. Because I got left behind somewhere in primary school though it was fully high stress, surviving and getting A grades but with no actual understanding of what I was doing. I basically had a breakdown during my last year of school and just wrote ‘x = 4′ for an entire paper.’
I wonder how many people this would resonate with when it comes to maths? That feeling of getting by under the radar, but without the real understanding or self-belief to thrive?
I know that I was lucky in that maths always came easily to me at school and I loved the buzz of new concepts slotting into place in my brain. As I got older though, through A-level maths, my degree and then actuarial training, there were definitely times where I felt lost and it was honestly terrifying. I would look at the page and genuinely just not have a clue what I was reading or how to make it make sense and it gave me, albeit later in life, an insight into how so many children must feel doing maths at school.
I actually taught maths one-to-one during university as a part-time job, and what I learned through that was that so much of maths is just about confidence, about overcoming that instinct where your brain starts to panic and believing that you can do it, that you can understand – it might just take some time or someone to explain it in a different way.
Ironically I didn’t seem to be able to transfer this to supporting my own children with their maths, and would often find myself frustrated, snapping at them – ‘just LOOK! It’s obvious!’ NOT helpful parenting at all.
If Eedi had been around when my children were younger I would have definitely signed up and spared us all my impatience.
Eedi is an online maths platform for children that really taps into that idea of confidence being key. It focuses on children in years 6, 7 and 8, where habits and beliefs about yourself and your abilities are really starting to solidify and where that extra confidence can have a real impact.
Children can choose to study any topic, at any level, at any time, whether it’s to do their homework, revise for tests or stay ahead by learning new topics. Over 100,000 children, parents and teachers use and trust Eedi and 98% of children say they feel more confident after just one lesson, which is an amazing statistic isn’t it?
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