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Helping your child with reading and math at home

Rising up: Helping your child with reading and math at home

2022 | Written by Faith Schantz, Report Editor

Following are tips for helping children of all ages with reading and math at home, from OpenLiteracy, GreatSchools, and other sources.

General support

  • Help children get organized by posting a list of what they need to bring to school each day by the front door. Break big tasks into smaller tasks. Create a calendar for each child with due dates, including steps along the way for long-term projects.

  • Set a time to complete homework that works for your child.

  • Encourage children to find a quiet space to work. Teens often believe they can do their homework with the TV on and/or with their phones in hand, but research suggests multi-tasking is inefficient.

  • The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh is a resource for more than books. The main and branch libraries offer homework help, tutoring, and activities for children and teens. Library cards are free for city residents and fines are no longer charged for overdue materials.

  • Visit the Ed Navigator for many resources, including a guide for what skills your child should know and be able to do at each grade level.

  • If you need to brush up on your own skills in order to help your child, you can take free online courses at Khan Academy, find free help with speaking and reading English and other content skills at Literacy Pittsburgh, or check out this GreatSchools page with guides for all age ranges.

Helping your child with reading

  • Learn simple activities to build your child’s comprehension and knowledge of phonics in these videos by Sarah Scott Frank of OpenLiteracy (scroll to “Literacy Resources”). Find more family literacy resources at OpenLiteracy, including sites for picture books read out loud online.

  • 412 Rhymes is a free, fun, interactive set of lessons for beginning readers, sequenced according to the science of reading.

  • Help children who struggle with comprehension develop pre-reading skills by encouraging them to read text that is highlighted graphically or visually first, such as titles, headings, subheadings, photo captions, and text in bold or italics. Forming an idea of what a text is going to be about before reading it can help children better understand it.

  • Keep reading out loud to your children even after they can read to themselves, and read the books they’re reading yourself so you can talk about them together. Conversations about books and even individual words are great ways to build children’s vocabulary and comprehension.

  • Staff at the Carnegie Library can help you find books to match your child’s interests, including graphic novels and audiobooks.

  • Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library sends free, high quality books to children each month from birth to age five, regardless of family income.

  • Visit GreatSchools for more reading tips.

Helping your child with math

You can help your children become mathematical thinkers through daily activities. For example:

  • Ask your child to help measure ingredients for a recipe.

  • Work with them to make charts, tables, and graphs of information that interests them.

  • Talk about and compare prices while shopping.

  • If you are doing “mental math,” say it out loud around your children.

  • Ask young children to count, sort, and compare groups of objects, and place them in rows.

  • See how many triangles, squares, and rectangles you can find together in a room.

  • On a walk or in your home, look for shapes that tessellate (fit together in a pattern with no overlap or unused space, like a honeycomb), and shapes with symmetry.

Homework

Parents sometimes feel at a loss when their children need help with math homework, because of unfamiliar ways of teaching or unfamiliar terms. You can help your child—without doing the problem for them—even if you don’t completely understand. Consider asking these questions:

  • Let’s look at the directions. What are you being asked to find out?

  • Have you seen a problem like this in class? Where do you think you should begin?

  • Is there any part of the problem you already know how to do?

  • Would it help to make a list, a drawing, a chart, or a table?

  • What do you estimate the answer will be?

  • Look at the problem again. Does your answer seem reasonable?

  • Is there another way to check your answer?

For more help, visit GreatSchools for math-specific tips.