Post written by Zen Family Habits contributor Suzannah. Follow her on Twitter.

Do you remember sitting in math class as a kid, thinking, “When am I ever going to use this in real life?”

You might not have wanted to admit it at the time, but basic math skills are essential to daily routines–at school, at work, and at home.

If your children seem unresponsive to math, help them find ways to change their perspective. Learning these skills needn’t be boring, and you can be part of the process by encouraging new and exciting teaching methods at home.

If you want to help your kids love math, remember to:

1. Make it relevant. Kids need to understand why math is important. How is it going to help them? When will they use it in real life?

2. Make it hands-on. Most children don’t respond well to pencil-and-paper activities. Use concrete materials to make learning more authentic.

3. Make it fun. Keep the tone light so they don’t feel like you’re giving them an extra school lesson. Act in a supportive manner, and don’t force them to continue if they become irritable.

Fun Math Ideas for Home

Here are 25 great everyday math activities you can share with your kids at home. Most of them can be adapted to be age-appropriate for your family:

1. Play Memory or Go-fish with various types of math flashcards.
2. Use a pair of 6-sided dice to practice times tables (up to 6×6), or for hands-on addition and subtraction.
3. Use healthy snacks like dry cereal, small crackers, dried fruit and cheese cubes for simple addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.
4. Play Monopoly to help teach money sense.
5. Keep a box of loose change for play and counting.
6. Use real or play money to practice “buying” things from around the house.
7. Give your children a small amount of money and take them to the store, then have them find 5 different items they can purchase with their money before they decide.
8. Get kids to time themselves doing every day activities, then record the numbers. See if they can beat their previous score the next time they do those activities.
9. Teach your kids how to follow a recipe to help reinforce fractions, measurements, and conversions. They will need to become familiar with cup and spoon measurements, as well as weights.
10. Buy a small kitchen scale for weighing different items. Guess which items will be heavier. List in order from lightest to heaviest, or vice-versa.
11. Practice with fluid measurements in the bathtub using a variety of different sized measuring cups. Ask kids what they think will happen to the water level if they add a bath toy to the cup.
12. Use a ruler to find the length of certain objects. Or, specify a length and see if your children can find a household object to match.
13. Print off geometric shape nets to cut and assemble, to help reinforce 3-dimensional objects.
14. Cut and paste a variety of construction paper shapes onto a background to make a scene.
15. Plan a scavenger hunt for objects shaped like spheres, cones, cubes, rectangular prisms, etc.
16. For younger children, use a number of small baskets, boxes or containers labelled with words and pictures. Get kids to sort their toys or other items into different categories (type of toy, colour, size, indoor/outdoor, etc.)
17. Haul out an old puzzle. Sort the pieces into two groups–edge pieces and inside pieces. Then sort the edge pieces by colour or pattern. Once you’ve assembled the outside of the puzzle, sort the inner pieces into categories before trying to complete it.
18. Use craft materials or stamps to create both simple and advanced patterns in an art piece.
19. Make patterns with ‘found items’ like stones, sticks, leaves or flowers.
20. For data management, get kids to make their own reward charts for anything from toilet training, to completing chores, to homework recognition. Allow them to record their results (or put stickers in) the correct boxes each day.
21. Play Battleship to practice finding graph coordinates.
22. Take a walk around your neighborhood and note key features, then have your children create a map from memory.
23. Put 5 various items into a bucket, then add 10 or more of the same item–a handful of marbles, for example. Ask children whether it’s more likely they will choose a marble or one of the other items, and why. Let them choose and see if their prediction was correct. Record what they choose several times in a row so they can see a pattern develop.
24. Teach older children to play Chess to develop logic and strategic thinking.
25. Use a blank BINGO form to create your own math games. You can use them to reinforce virtually any math area you like by filling in the template with numbers, fractions, clock faces, basic operation questions, etc.

When you make math engaging and fun at home, you teach your kids valuable skills, and set the foundations they need to be receptive to math in a school setting. Best of all, they’ll enjoy these experiences all the more because they get to share them with you.