I am a father of an 8 years old boy and I live in USA. Math and Science are two of my objectives as a parent involved in my child education.I use every occasion to connect math with real life and here is a link to a useful site dedicated to this subject:
Archived: Helping Your Child Learn Math : Introduction
Motivating children with money might work but it must be done very carefully. You don't want your child to learn only for the financial rewards from his parents.I agree that this might work in certain condition and I prefer to "package" this motivation method in a game.For example,when my son had some subtractions homework to do I told him to bet with is colleagues that he can subtract 999,999,999,999.00 or another number of this format from any other greater number, faster than a pocket calculator.
That was enough to captivate his attention.I continued by telling him that Math is magic and that I can tell him how he can do this too if he will keep it secret.At this point he was over excited and ready for"delivery".First,I gave him an example,let`s say
6,463,890,547,906.00 - 999,999,999.00 = 5,574,901,658,017.00
He could not believe his eyes when he saw that it took me a couple of seconds to write the answer.Than,I asked him to observe a pattern.It did not took long until he realized that I have just added 1 to each digit from the greater number and subtracted 1 from the first one (which was 6).He was very excited to learn this "secret" and to try it at school in order to impress his colleagues a an to make some money.
In the end,I gave him another "psychological" advice:the bigger the numbers,the better because it will take longer to be keyed in the computer than it will take him to simply write the answer by adding 1.Also,he will have to write the answer from right to left in order to create the illusion that he actually did a difficult computation.
I hope this will help other parents to play math with their children.
George
Aviation for Kids