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As an adult, student, or parent, it is common to experience a lack of confidence in dealing with numbers.  This common problem many times gets blown out of proportion and can sometimes be a roadblock to success in school, work, or helping your children become more confident in their abilities.  In this article, I outline five skill areas to improve in order to increase your own skill, speed of calculations, and self-confidence when thinking mathematically.

These skill areas are exactly that: things to practice repeatedly until you can do them quickly and with confidence.  In school, beware of things being taught but with inadequate time given to practice.  Think of these ideas as homework assignments for you or your children.  If given enough time, these building blocks can tremendously help a student get through mathematical situations in school or life with ease!

Math Skill Building Block #1: Basic Math Facts

This step is very common sense, but extremely important, and is sometimes not practiced enough in elementary school before students are allowed to move on.  Everybody MUST know addition and subtraction facts of at least two-digit numbers.  We have to combine or take away quantities like this every day, and we don’t need a calculator!  Push the calculator away; practice adding or subtracting two-digit numbers comfortably until you can do this quickly without your fingers.

Learning the multiplication facts up to at least 12 is also a must.  When you really know these, you should be able to list the multiples of 12 easily, or count backwards from 100 by 7’s, etc.  If You Are working with your child, try these multiple lists or counting backwards subtract exercises.

TIP:   Break numbers apart in order to add or subtract.  Instead of 12 + 39, think of it as 10 plus 39 equals 49, but add two more to get 51.   OR     12 plus 40 is 52, take away one more is 51.  This is an excellent mental math exercise.

Math Skill Building Block #2: Working with Percents

Knowing how to take a percent of a number is really just taking a part of a whole amount.  We know how important this is when we work with money, finance, buying & selling, investment, and other parts of our lives. 

Students must be able to work with percent concepts.  To practice, find 10% of any number.  Of course, this is just moving the decimal point over one place to the left.  For example, 10% of 55 is 5.5, 10% of 39.6 is 3.96, and 10% of 442 is 44.2.

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