Official Family Calculator

What To Do

Just like children have to read a lot of books to become fluent readers, they also need to add a lot of numbers to become fluent in calculation. But this doesn’t have to mean pages and pages of worksheets. We adults calculate all the time. Get your child involved by making him or her the official family calculator.

When you’re writing a check in your checkbook, let your child calculate the balance for you. When the family’s playing a card game with a score, let your child be the scorekeeper. Just for fun, start keeping track of how many apples your family eats, how many minutes of walking you do, or how much money you’re spending on groceries every week, and let your family calculator add up the totals.

Moving On

Just like shooting free throws or playing scales on an instrument, the basic skills of calculation only get better with practice. Your official family calculator can keep on going until the next child is ready to take over, or you can divide the tasks so that an older family calculator does multiplication/division and the younger one handles addition/subtraction.