Math Homework: How You Can Help

Teachers have many goals in mind when choosing, designing, and assigning mathematics homework. These include: to provide practice with skills and strategies students already understand in order to build fluency, ease, and confidence to build understanding of a mathematics concept to review previously learned content to engage students in problem-solving to practice math process skills such as representation or communication to practice and build automaticity with math facts to extend a lesson or provide an additional challenge to prepare for the next day’s math lesson.

With these goals in mind, teachers assign a variety of different types of math homework assignments. Your child may be asked to: play a math game, write in a math journal, solve word problems, find multiple solutions, work on an open-ended problem, prove a solution, practice math facts, collect data, or take measurements. These math assignments may look different from ones you experienced in elementary school. For most of us, homework in elementary school consisted almost exclusively of pages of computation problems. While computation practice is still a part of math homework, assignments now ask students to apply a variety of strategies, solve problems in multiple ways, or puzzle through their own solution methods. There are rarely sample problems at the top of the page that show a student (or a parent!) exactly how to complete the rest of the homework.

How Can You Help with Math Homework?

It’s important to keep in mind that any sort of help we offer children in school or at home needs to be the kind of help that will lead the child to complete the next assignment with greater independence, self-direction, and understanding. So, while it may be tempting, especially if it’s twenty minutes before bedtime, to rush in and show your child “how to do it”, it’s more helpful to ask questions that help your child to reflect on her or his problem-solving process, bring to mind and use prior knowledge and experiences, and consider strategies that could be used to get started.

Here are some questions that work well:

Getting Started

Can you retell the problem in your own words? What do you need to find out? Is there anything you did in math class today that might help you understand this problem? Is this problem like any other problems you’ve solved in the past? Which problem solving strategy do you think you could use to get started? (Could you draw a diagram? work backwards? make a chart or list? use guess and check? look for or use a pattern?) How have you gotten started? Tell me your thinking about what you’ve done so far.... What could you try next? While working what ways could you record your thinking or solution? How can you organize the information? What would happen if...? What have you already figured out? What do you need to find out next?

Reflecting or Sharing:

Why did you decide to solve the problem this way? Is there another way to solve this kind of problem? What other ways do you think your classmates might use? How do you know that your answer makes sense? Convince me. Tell me about how you double-checked your work. Did you get stuck at all while you were working? What did you do to get “unstuck”? Did you try anything that didn’t work? Look back at your work, what is something you did well? Can you find two things you could do to improve your work?

Overall, the best way to help your child with mathematics homework is to help him or her to know that good math thinking takes time (i.e. it’s not about speed), that mistakes are opportunities for learning, and that developing as a problem solver often means having to put lots of effort into puzzling through confusing problems.