I'm often asked by parents what they should be doing to keep up their children’s learning in the school holidays. The holidays provide an ideal opportunity for parents to encourage their children to view learning as a life-long activity, not just something you do at school. Just as much learning occurs informally as it does formally in the classrooms and children need occasionally to be left to educate themselves.
Some of you may find the pattern of the 4x table that I’m about to highlight so obvious that you wonder why I’m writing about it. Others will say “Wow I never noticed that” and the rest will probably think “But how could that help?”
To become proficient with both English and maths, there has to be an underlying foundation of basics permanently embedded in your child’s memory. While there will always be a need for figuring things out on the spot, your child can’t escape the need to rote-learn certain words and basic number facts.
