Is your child struggling with Year 7 Maths?

If your child struggled on the Year 6 SATs maths papers last term, they may be having a hard time with more than just the material.

What makes so many Year 7 students
think they’re “bad at maths?”

Fear of maths usually comes from a combination of poor results and the emotional reactions that follow them.
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Imagine a scenario where, a few years ago, a child had a not-great experience in a maths class—perhaps they just didn’t connect well with the teacher for whatever reason, and so they struggled with the material, and maybe as a result they developed some negative feelings around maths.

It's normal for that to happen from time to time with any subject.

The specific problem with maths is that it's cumulative—which means that whatever they learned (or didn’t learn) that year is often the starting point for the material they have to learn the next year!

So if they missed something in Year 4, it came back to bite them in Year 5, which led to more bad results and more frustration. And then THAT missed material came back to bite them especially hard in Year 6, because it was all on the SATs and they weren’t able to do the job.

That would have to be pretty frustrating and discouraging for a young person to experience, wouldn’t it?

So…how do we help frustrated young people get better at maths?

We help our students build a new relationship with maths—
by helping them approach it like a game!

The object of the game

Maths, at EVERY LEVEL, is all about creative problem solving. You get a piece of information, and you manipulate it until you find the missing piece of information the question is asking you about!

An arrow curling top-left to bottom-right

An arrow curling top-right to bottom-left

The moves

Focus on identifying and getting comfortable with Year 7 maths question types as you see them—things like simplifying algebra and solving equations by substituting.

Practise the moves in combination

Start with smaller groups of questions on related topics, and build outward until you’re comfortable with all the material!

Play the game

Take practise tests. Come up with them yourself, or ask your teacher or…you know…some friendly local outside educator to see if they can create some for you!

Some children who are already really discouraged might have trouble engaging with maths at all. Here’s how to help them get back on track:

A student who’s deep in their heads with the idea that they’re “bad at maths” needs, quite simply, to unlearn that limiting belief about themselves.

That doesn’t mean staring at themselves in the mirror and saying “I’m GREAT at maths!” over and over again every morning—because the brain has heard the opposite so many times that it will retort, “No I’m not!” and make the whole exercise useless. So, instead…

Teach them to let go of regret. Remind them that, no matter how it feels right now, a bad performance on an assessment does not automatically mean that a person is doomed to a life of failure. Help them learn to move on from past poor results and get back to the task at hand!
(Read more about letting go of regret)
Teach them to create a new possibility for success. It’s not about convincing them they’re good at maths already—it’s about creating doubt that they have to stay bad at maths forever. Because the truth is, we really don’t know how good they can get!
(Read more: "You Don't Know Your Limits!")
Teach them that it’s okay to play badly at first! They may need to relearn some old material from a few years ago in order to catch up and pull ahead. And that’s totally fine! In fact, that's often the first step to improving. Because we can't improve if we quit.
(Read more about playing badly at first)

For more help with Year 6 maths, you click "Contact Us"orsign up for a 30 day free trial of MuchSmarter Games to help your child start practising on your own!