Word problems. Oh, word problems. They get such a bad rap. But what if word problems aren’t as scary as they’ve been made out to be? What if the fault lies not with the word problems, but with the way we think about them? Moreover, what if the problem is the way we teach children to think about them?

Have you ever asked your child to guess how many there were of something and gotten a blank stare in return? There’s a good reason for this! Estimating isn’t a skill that develops automatically. It takes a lot of practice!

When our children go to school, they will encounter real-world problems (aka word problems) on an almost daily basis. Starting as young as kindergarten, our children will be asked to apply what they know about math to real-world settings.

Did you know that learning the calendar is an early math skill? Before your child can learn to tell time on a clock, they need understand the units of time on a calendar.