Is your child struggling with Year 8 Maths?

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

What makes so many young people
believe that they are “bad at maths?”

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 happens. It’s a normal thing.

The problem is, maths is 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, say, Year 4, it would have come back to bite them in Year 5, leading to more bad results and more frustration—and then THAT missed material came back again in Year 6.

Even worse, ALL of it was on the SATs, all mixed together.

That would have to be pretty frustrating and discouraging for a young person to experience, wouldn’t it? And maths continues to build on what came before, so without an intervention, we may see things get worse and worse until the student fully disengages from the subject.

So…how do we help a struggling student pull out of that spiral and improve their maths game?

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

Understand the object of the Maths 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

Learn the moves of the game

Focus on getting comfortable with Year 8 maths question types as you see them—things like expanding single brackets, calculating slope, and more!

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 young people believe they’re SO “bad at maths” that they don’t want to try anymore. How do we 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 belief. 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 here!)
Remind them that difficulty is temporary. You might hear your child say, instead of that they’re “bad at maths,” that maths is “too hard” for them. In that moment…it might do to remind them that when they were very small, talking was also hard for them, and they seem to have figured that out by now! Everything we learn starts out difficult, and becomes easy with consistent practise. So keep at it!
(Read more about making difficulty disappear!)
Teach them that it’s okay to play badly at first. In this case, that has two meanings: first, accept that mistakes are normal and natural, and that we can learn from them. The second thing is, they may have to re-learn some earlier material in order to catch themselves up to where they are in their current class!
(Read more about playing badly at first!)

For more help with Year 8 maths, click "Contact Us" or sign up for a 30 day free trial of MuchSmarter Games to help your child start practising on your own!