Most of the parents , ask me this question, “How can my child improve his/her maths skill?”. I do give some tips to them, some follow those , some do not. But who followed them have really improved. Today I got a call from a parent of one of my students. She thanked me because her daughter started securing above 90% in Maths. This student has joined one year ago. Slowly she started showing improvements. I’m repeating the word slowly. But she religiously followed the tips given by me. Those tips I’m sharing here, hoping that , these would be helpful to the students who want to improve.
Practice makes perfect and patience helps you to practice:
To build any skill practise is required, and maths is not an exception . Maths needs lot of practice. First make your mind to improve your maths skills and start practicing. Once you have learnt a concept, start applying that while solving sums. and patience 🙂 . Don’t get disheartened or loose patience if you can’t solve the sum. Start from the beginning. After some attempts you will be able to solve.
Understand the concepts :
Understand each concept thoroughly. If not ask your teacher , friends or whoever can help you.
Avoid silly mistakes:
Whenever my students write tests, if I ask them how was the question paper. They reply saying, it was very nice. But the marks they obtain will be very less compared to their expectation. Then they give explanation, saying, they lost marks because of silly mistakes. Silly mistakes according to them, according to me these are serious mistakes. 🙂 . What are these silly mistakes? Copying the numbers wrongly, instead writing + writing – , or vice versa, etc. So while solving sums, concentrate. Recheck after solving a sum .These will avoid the silly mistakes.
Keep your work neat
Have a look at the below images. It is a solution of a sum.
Looking at this , anyone can’t understand anything. You see some numbers, x,y ,a,b etc That’s all :). The student who has written this, if refers back to the same sum again, he/she might not understand what is written. Now compare this with the below one:
Very clearly written and neat. The solution is written step by step. Keep the work neat. Whenever you have to refer back to your work , it will help you and also easy to trace back and see where you have gone wrong, in case you go wrong.
Analyze by drawing diagrams
Some problems in maths need to be analyzed. So while analyzing draw diagram according to your analysis. This will help you to find out where you are going wrong in analysing .
Take a test
After learning a concept or chapter, and you feel you have practised enough, then take tests. That will help to you know whether you have mastered the concept/chapter. You can also solve some sums within a fixed time frame. Like 20 sums in 30 minutes.
Memorize some of the basic concepts:
Whenever a student joins my class , I test the basic knowledge about maths, like remembering the multiplication tables, squares of a numbers, cubes of numbers etc. Whatever you want to memorize, try to practice everyday. I remember during our schoold our parents used to make us memorize basic concepts like tables everyday. It had become like a daily routine. This will improve the speed in solving sums.
I have shared these tips so that these might help at least few students who want improve their maths skills. These all are outcome of my experiences as teacher.
-Lets grow together intellectually,
Ranjana
