I spend a good chunk of my time these days learning about maths. I was always pretty decent at it at school and got a solid “C” at GCSE, but I never really deeply understood what was going on. As an adult and now parent, I’ve learned how important maths is in all areas of life. So I’m determined to do all I can to help my children to have a really strong maths understanding. This page contains websites for maths which I’ve found useful in this maths journey. And hopefully they’ll be helpful for you too. Make sure to bookmark this page and join the mailing list so you don’t miss future updates.
Build Math Minds (YouTube channel & CPD site)
Run by Christina Tondevold, an elementary educator and author in the US, Build Math Minds has had the stronger influence on how I teach my boys maths. It’s aim is to help teachers and parents to build children’s maths minds and not just turn them into human calculators. She refers to herself as the Recovering Traditionalist and indeed she advocates for math teaching to be much more about understanding and flexibility, than learning to do standard procedures and tricks. Build Math Minds also provides CPD for maths instructors.
Build Math Minds YouTube channel
The Recovering Traditionalist Website
Topmarks.co.uk (Activities and Printables)
Top Marks is a superb hub of engaging online activities as well as some really well designed printable worksheets. As with all high quality sites, you can select the age range and then filter by the specific topics (geometry, fractions, algebra, multiplication, etc).
NCETM (Guidance for Maths teaching)
The National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics (NCETM) is an organisation that works to improve maths teaching in England. It primarily caters to teachers but as parents it’s a good resource to understand how maths is being taught in schools so we can mirror these approaches at home.
Oak National Academy (Free teaching Resources)
Oak National Academy is an unbelievably rich resource for teaching materials. It was set up at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic to provide resources for teachers and parents during the sudden lockdowns. You can find lesson plans, worksheets, slides and more, all free and all keyed to the National Curriculum. And I really like the website, it’s so easy to find what you need.
Superstarworksheets (Wide Range of Printables)
Pre-prepared worksheets can be extremely useful when teaching our children maths. However, the majority of websites I come across only provide very boring worksheets made up or lists of questions to answer. Superstarworksheets on the other hand has a wide selection of different kinds of worksheets containing lots of different ways of visualising numbers and foundational mathematical concepts. For example, they’ve got lots of worksheets that use the cherry model to deepen children’s understanding of partitioning and recomposing numbers (part-part-whole).