Math is not just a subject that your child learns for an hour a day in school and then puts away like a textbook until tomorrow. You can help math make sense to your child by showing that it is everywhere in his or her world.

There are many excellent ways to help your young child build math skills at home. Take a few minutes to try a few of the suggestions below, and then see what else you can add to your repertoire. Once you start, you’ll find ways to help your child use math in almost everything you do…

Counting and sorting skills. Next week you have a presentation for a meeting, and you’re going to need a packet for each of the 27 attendees. It’s time for help! Ask your child to count out 27 of each of the items that make up the packet: handouts, folders, pens, etc. Your child will feel proud to have helped you and will be practicing important early math skills.

Measuring skills. Any number of things can be measured at home. Take the time to let your child help you measure the table with a tape measure so you buy the correctly sized tablecloth or measure the photo print with a ruler so you purchase the right frame.

Multiplying skills. You have the team coming over to your house for a pre-game meal (or maybe it’s the entire family for a celebration). You want to make your favorite never-fail main dish, but you need to feed double the number of people that the recipe serves. It’s time to enlist your child’s help in increasing the ingredient amounts. Depending on the age of your child, you can practice basic multiplying of whole numbers or even the more complex skill of multiplying fractions.

Averaging skills. The next time you fill up your gasoline tank, ask your child to help you discover the “miles per gallon” that your car is averaging. It’s simple: divide the total number of miles you have driven since your last fill-up by the number of gallons that you just added to your tank. The solution will be the average number of miles that your car gets from a gallon of gas.

Children of all ages can have fun practicing math at home and learning its importance to their lives. From the youngest child who helps you count the eggs needed for a recipe to the older child who helps compute your square footage of living space, your children will learn that math is more than a problem in a textbook: it’s an integral part of daily life.