Homeschooling: A Parent’s Guide to Teaching Maths

Homeschooling offers students unique opportunities for individualised and tailored learning. Parents who take on this responsibility deserve all the support in the world. This blog is my small contribution to this, in the hope that I can make life a little easier for you and give you effective, evidence informed tips to ace home education.

How to structure a lesson?

School lessons are normally 1 hour, this seems like a fair amount of time for students to focus on one subject while also giving enough time to fully engage the brain in the current topic. My experience of running 1-to-1 tutoring lessons has reinforced this idea; I think 1 hour is the perfect length of time.

Start with a starter…

This is essential. It engages the brain in mathematical thinking, it settles the student down and it gives you, as the teacher, time to organise your thoughts as well. Furthermore, starters are the best opportunity for retrieval practice. Retrieval practice is a technical term in teaching which essentially means ‘good revision’. Retrieving memories of mathematical ideas, concepts or methods, then using them, reinforces the memory while also practicing the logical thinking or numerical reasoning skills. The key is to give students starters which they are capable of doing themselves, while also requiring them to work hard on recalling necessary knowledge and think about the activity. There are several amazing resources online for this, however my favourite ones are:

Corbett Maths 5-a-day – Thousands of mixed question sheets, designed to quickly practice past topics questions.
MathsWhiteBoard – Pick 4 questions from their huge catalogue of KS2/3/4/5 maths questions, then click to reveal the full answer.

Starters should be completed independently. Students should be encouraged to persevere if they struggle, while also working against a timer to keep the pressure on and ensure they are focused during this time. This is how we avoid students constantly forgetting what was covered last week, last month or last year. Over time, you should build up routines for starters with clear expectations of focused work during this time. You may include questions relevant to the current upcoming lesson. For example, if you are about to teach angles in parallel lines, your starter should recap problems involving angles on a straight line

Introduce a new concept, method or idea.

An example of how we would teach a new topic.

Now the starter is complete, the student is ready to think about maths. Over a series of lessons, you can build a strong conceptual understanding of a new mathematical method or idea.

This is not easy. I would recommend that you carefully consider how to build this up gradually. Start by reviewing pre-requisite knowledge which is foundational to this new concept; are they confident with the background knowledge? If not, take the time to review the prior knowledge.

If you are struggling to think of a method of explaining or introducing a concept, try searching the Addvance YouTube channel for our explanation. It may give you some inspiration of where to start. You can then adapt and personalise to your own son/daughter.

Worked Examples and Practice Pairs

This is a powerful teaching technique. Start by demonstrating a methodical worked example, explaining each step carefully and the logic behind each step. Discuss the steps together, and when you are satisfied that they have understood it’s time for them to try. Give a similar question for them to try and see if they can complete the steps themselves. Offer feedback on their method; Could the presentation be improved? Is there a clever shortcut to one of the steps? How could they go faster next time?

Next, you can spend more time practicing similar questions or move onto harder examples.

You can find resources for questions by looking through the Addvance Curriculum Guides here:

Silent Individual Practice

Students need focused time to understand and process what they have learned. This needs to be away from a screen, without distractions and with high expectations. This is how we move from basic understanding to mastery. I would recommend at least 4 lots of 20 minutes of silent practice per week in maths. This should then be marked, and feedback given, showing students that we value their hard work and offering constructive ideas for improvements in the future.

This may feel uncomfortable for us as educators. When I first trained to be a teacher, I felt obliged to talk and engage with students for the full lesson. In fact, the best thing we can do to promote learning is to encourage students to work independently and practice themselves without us talking to them and distracting their thought process.

Extension

Once you are satisfied that students have mastered the skill, it is now time to extend it. There are many resources available to push students further and increase their skill level. This normally involves either problem solving tasks or interweaved tasks, which directly relate to tasks they have already learned.

Mathematical Problem Solving – Being given a question which requires several steps in which the method is not immediately clear.

Interwoven Tasks – Tasks which bring separate areas of maths together forcing a student to think about two or more different methods or concepts simultaneously. (For example: Finding the area of triangles with sides measured in fractions or decimals).

Resources

MathsGenie.com

MathsGenie has lots of exam style questions for secondary school maths. It’s great for quickly finding worksheets on lots of maths topics.

UKMT

UKMT challenges push students to think logically and solve problems. The design of the questions is brilliant for challenging students throughout high school.

Corbett Maths

Type “Corbett Maths Textbook + (Name of Topic)” into google. It’s the quickest way to find fantastic worksheets on any high school maths topic. For example: Corbett Maths Textbook Solving Equations.

Maths4Everyone

This website has lots more GCSE questions for many different topics.

Geogebra

This website has a lot of interactive simulations for Geometry. If you are teaching anything involving 2D or 3D shapes, try looking for the simulation of it on Geogebra. It’s a powerful tool for visualising abstract concepts.

Type “Geogebra Net of a Cone” into google (or any other topic name) to easily find what you are looking for.

Good luck!

Homeschooling will be an amazing journey for you, and we wish you the very best with it. Teaching is about building relationships, overcoming challenges and persevering. The resources available online are incredibly vast and rich, there has been no better time to homeschool students.

If you have any questions about homeschooling maths, please feel free to comment below. We will do our best to support you.