Elementary Math Help
My family loves chocolate chip cookies. Actually, my family loves chocolate chip cookie dough. Whatever dough doesn’t get eaten gets made into cookies, which promptly get eaten. I make chocolate cookies every few weeks using the same recipe that I’ve used for years.
You would think that for as many times as I have made those cookies I would have the recipe memorized. For the most part, I do. However, I like to take a peak at it just to make sure I don’t miss anything or get my measurements mixed up.
Sometimes we all need to look at our recipes or notes to jog our memory or just to make sure we are doing something correctly. I’m a fan of using resources like this to help kids be proficient in math. When I was in school, we called them cheat sheets. The teacher knew about them and allowed us to use them, so it wasn’t really cheating. They were simply papers with information meant to jog our memory about information we already learned, but either didn’t use all the time or hadn’t committed to memory.
Some teachers even put math cheat sheets and memory jogger posters on the walls. Some posters would have multiplication tables, while others would have geometry formulas.
Benefits Of Math Help Cheat Sheets
- Build confidence in math abilities
- Helps students work more independently
- Can help students show they understand concepts rather than just memorize information
- Helps students memorize important math facts
Creating An Elementary Math Help Resource
I kind of forgot about these kinds of math help resources with my kids. Each of them had a multiplication table they filled out in 2nd or 3rd grade that they moved from book to book with them over the years, but that was about it.
As we worked through math this year with my 11 year old, I noticed that we had to stop and pause often for him to try and remember a math fact or how to do a certain math problem that he had learned before. He didn’t need to relearn those facts. He just needed to remember them.
Math Skills Lapbook
Instead to trying to pull something together myself or plaster our house with posters, I looked to the places I usually go to for homeschool help. It didn’t take long to find just what I needed.
We have used A Journey Through Learning lapbooks for years. They have been fun ways for the kids to take notes about what they have learned and to create a resource they can use to review the material. This Math Assistant lapbook is a little different.
My Math Assistant is a downloadable file that can be printed and made into a lapbook just like any other AJTL lapbook download. The difference it that My Math Assistant already contains the information for the student. There is no need to find the answers and fill anything out. This lapbook is meant to be a math reference tool.
From multiplication tables to orders of operations and from place values geometry formulas, My Math Assistant is great math help for your elementary and middle school students. (It is labeled as a 5th grade resource.) AJTL, also, has math lapbooks for help with other elementary math levels, addition and subtraction games, and more!
What about you? Do you use any math help resources or cheat sheets with your students?