Interactive maths activities can be a valuable learning resource. They can help children engage with education and support a greater degree of knowledge absorption. Learn more about the benefits of interactive maths activities in this article.
Whether you’re a parent, carer, or teacher, you might be thinking about using interactive maths activities to enhance the education of children in your care. Interactive maths activities such as maths videos, teaching slides, worksheets and games can get children excited about learning. Interactive learning resources can also help lessons sink into young minds, improving learning retention.
But before you choose activities to use for home learning or to complement lesson plans, you probably want to make sure activities are worthwhile, especially if they come at a cost. While we offer a free membership that includes access to some useful resources, our paid membership options unlock even more learning materials suitable for different age ranges. So is it worth paying out for interactive maths activities?
In this article, we’ll take a look at the benefits of interactive maths activities, and how they can aid development.
Maths Activities Help Children Engage with Education
At Master the Curriculum, we believe fun and education go hand in hand. Just like the rest of us, children need a balance between work and play, and enjoyable learning resources can engage children in education by allowing them to have fun and learn at the same time. Interactive maths activities are designed to be as enjoyable as possible, so they’re perfect for engaging children in lessons.
When using traditional methods of learning, such as textbooks and presentations, children can drift off into their imagination. But interactive activities capture children’s attention — it’s not so easy for them to get lost in daydreams as they’ll need to focus if they’re going to progress, succeed at challenges and complete activities. As a result, they’ll be more engaged in the lessons taught with interactive maths activities.
Interactive Maths Activities Personalise the Learning Experience
Using interactive maths activities, you can provide an almost tailor-made and personalised learning experience for children. By adjusting difficulty levels and hand-picking resources that meet individual pupils’ interests, you can tailor the experience to children’s personal goals and learning targets.
Tailoring activities can be hugely beneficial to children’s development — especially when personalised activities are used alongside whole-class lesson plans. School lessons are designed to meet the needs of all pupils in the classroom, but naturally, this means individual needs can be missed. But with resources chosen specifically for individual children, pupils can get the personalised learning experience they need to better understand lessons.
So for example, teachers may give different pupils different maths worksheets depending on their abilities. This can help them consolidate their strengths and improve their areas of weakness.
Maths Activities Support and Boost Cognitive Development
Scientists have suggested interactivity can be hugely beneficial to learning, accelerating cognitive development and helping children take in and retain more information. Research suggests interactive learning resources allow children to explore and think about their own cognitive strategies and how they organise information.
The key here is that pupils are effectively given more control over how they absorb the information. By engaging in interactive learning, children are encouraged to develop their learning processes and strategies by actively participating in the experience. The result is a boost in cognitive development and an enhanced learning environment.
Interactive Maths Resources Engage Different Types of Learners
Several different learning styles can affect how children learn best. It is thought that most people are visual or auditory learners, meaning they learn best when using resources with visual elements such as pictures, diagrams, or videos, or when learning with sound and musical resources.
Different types of interactive maths activities can be suitable for different kinds of learners.
For example, maths videos and games can include visual and audio elements. Interactive activities can also engage kinesthetic and verbal learners by encouraging movement and asking children to speak out or write down answers. By introducing children to interactive learning tools, you can ensure that — regardless of their learning style — they receive an enriching educational experience.
If you’re looking for maths activities, why not sign up to Master the Curriculum to access free maths resources created by teachers? We have high-quality learning resources for different year groups, and we design every resource to be fun and engaging to help children achieve maths mastery.
