Everyday Maths

"Everyday Maths" is an exciting new project, run by Bristol University, working with parents of Year 3/4 children in 20 Bristol primary schools. The project aims to help parents think about the way they use maths in everyday life, so they can support their children’s learning. Most parents want to help their children learn, but often don’t feel confident with maths and aren’t sure how best to help. However, parents have a lot of experience using maths, even though this may be different from what is done at school. Parents sharing these experiences with their children can really help with maths learning.

There will be three parts to this project. The first part, from February to June 2013, will ask parents about their feelings around helping their children with maths: the kinds of activities they do which involve maths, how confident they are at helping, how often they help, how much they think their children enjoy maths, and so on. During the second part, from September 2013 to July 2014, the project team will support parents from four primary schools in a series of workshops, to share the ways in which they use maths and develop ideas around how they can use this to support their children’s learning. These workshops will be led by parents and focus on what is important and relevant to them in their lives. The third part of the project will evaluate how effective the workshops were at developing parents’ confidence in helping their children, and how schools and parents can use the workshop approach for themselves, outside of the project.

The project will help us understand more about home-school partnerships, and ways that parents can support their children’s learning. A toolkit for successful and sustainable parent workshops will help schools to develop home-school partnerships to support children's maths learning.

For more information about the Everyday Maths project, please see the project website.  Alternatively, contact Dr Tim Jay on 0117 331 4225 or tim.jay@bristol.ac.uk.