Articles
Guides and resources about math education.
Spaced Practice: Making Math Stick Past Tomorrow
Cramming fills the bucket for a night; spaced practice keeps the water in. Review the same day, two days later, a week later, and a month later — each review at a larger gap turns a studied fact into memory. For parents this means one simple shelf: a review bin and the rule of intervals, wrapped into the homework routine.
Building a Homework Routine That Works
A homework routine is not a marching order — it is a small system made of four moving parts: a fixed daily slot, a two-minute transition, a subject order, and a timer. When the system runs, the parent stops being the enforcer. Build the schedule, the setup, and the weekly rhythm that turns homework into a quiet, boring, repeatable habit.
Checking Your Work: Catching Mistakes Before They Count
Checking your work is not redoing it from scratch — it is a targeted hunt with specific tools: the plug-in method, the order swap, the reasonableness filter, and the three-minute rule. Learn which step in the problem is worth re-reading, and how to catch the slip before the teacher does.
Showing Work: Why Every Step Counts
Showing work is not a bragging contest or a bribe for partial credit — it is the actual machinery of thinking. Written steps let a child retrace their own path, let a helper point at the exact slipping line, and turn a blank page into a hunch they can test. Learn what good work looks like and how to coach the step, not the answer.
Math Notebooks: Notes That Actually Help You Learn
Most math notes are copying exercises in disguise. A real math notebook has three zones, a mistake ledger, a worked-example bank, and a line written in the child's own words. Learn the anatomy of a notebook that studies back, plus what a healthy notebook looks like from the outside.
Working Backward and Guess-and-Check: Problem-Solving Playbook
Two underappreciated problem-solving weapons every child should own before algebra: working backward reverses operations in order, and guess-and-check turns a decent guess into a sure answer with a table. Learn when to use which strategy, how to coach them, and why erasing a wrong guess is a mistake.