Homeschooling Maths, from Preschool to Highschool

When I started writing this post I was mum to a 13-year-old and an 11-year-old, both homeschooled kids. The elder son went to school briefly and, in all honesty, learnt absolutely nothing there, not even how to read. My younger son has never been inside a school, ever. They have been unschooled, homeschooled or worldschooled, I don’t mind what you want to call it. We don’t fit into any boxes and our homeschooling responds to age and location appropriateness, rather than a state or government curriculum. I just wanted to share our maths (math if you prefer) journey, mostly because I want to stop mums (or any homeschooling guardian) of small children from worrying. Knowing that I stressed and worried like crazy when I was a new homeschooler with one son who just didn’t get maths and, mostly, refused to do maths.

I just want to tell you that now, at 13, he can. He gets algebra, trigonometry, arithmetic and geometry. This is our story of homeschooling maths from preschool to high school.

UPDATE: He eventually sat Maths iGCSE with total success. It all worked out just fine.

How to Homeschool Maths, Our Way

Preschool, Prep, Kindergarten and Parenting

Numbers came naturally with very little effort. They just pick them up from daily life and the games they play.

There was Uno, plus playing cards and dice games to help numeracy along.

When they started playing online games their number recognition to many digits became extremely good, extremely fast.

Concepts such as halves and quarters, adding, taking away and dividing (sharing) came through naturally incorporating these ideas into our lives.

There was chocolate maths, where we’d buy a huge block of chocolate and divide it into equal parts, lego maths, where blocks represented fractions and of course cooking maths where weights and volumes came into play.

I’m sure you know how this early maths works, I’m sure you’ve seen what’s on the curriculum, all of this stuff is very easy to pick up from daily life and being around an adult that chatters incessantly about everything they do in mathematical terms.

On top of this, I bought workbooks, printed a few free worksheets and bought an online learning program. We had Study Ladder and used it over several years.

Written maths was more tricky. Back then I had to submit annual learning reports with work samples to the Queensland government. This was painful, he hated to hold a pencil and getting something, anything, on paper to submit was my annual nightmare.

I am now 100 % certain, knowing what I know, that this early written maths was a complete waste of time and totally unnecessary to the boys’ maths progression. I have sample learning plans and reports on this site from those early days, you can see an example of a maths learning report here.

Maths While Travelling, Age 6 and 8 to 11 and 13

We travelled full time with the kids for a lot of years. We are well-known in “worldschooling” circles and I’ve had books published on both worldschooling and homeschooling. A lot of the boys’ learning took place in far-off lands, and they, and we, are all the better for it.

If you’d like to read more on worldschooling, go to the poat “What is Worldschooling” on our sister site. That page will open in a new tab so you won’t lose this page. We could do this because we are British. We reverted to being British, went home before travelling, and resigned our Australian homeschool registration. Once we left the country we had to do that. Yes, I have this in writing. This may be different today.

We enjoyed using the following maths workbooks and textbooks, Help Your Kids With Math (a good reference book for the basics.) Then we liked this series of workbooks, you’ll be able to find them for any grade, year, or age group. (younger kids.) We did not force rote-learning of times-tables at a young age, we found it unneccessary. By the time they got to the teen years they knew what 7×6 was anyway. Instead we wen’t the route of understanding how it all worked. I remember standing in class reciting times tables as a 4 year old. I never understood what I was doing or why, I thought it was a song! If you choose to sit exams, you’ll need to see the maths curriculum for your particular exam board, country, or state. If it’s not free online, you may have to but it in book form to make sure you’re covering what’s going to be on the paper.

Sometimes we travelled fast, to every corner of the globe from the high Himalayas to the deserts of Egypt. When we’re on the road we do very little formal learning of any sort.

The boys were soaking up history, geography and cultures as well as improving their English and general knowledge through reading extensively.

Maths skills were sharpened through currency conversions and train timetables.

One son loved to count money and figure out how much he had in kip, dollar and dong, the other wasn’t interested and that’s fair enough.

2 boys, 2 totally different personalities and learning styles despite almost identical lives. This is another of the big secrets known only to experienced parents, they are who they are, parenting changes little. We shouldn’t be trying to change them.

When we had quiter times we carried on with more complex workbooks and got stuck into Khan Academy Maths. Khan Academy is free, but it’s too comples for small kids, the instructors talk too fast.

I wouldn’t leave a child to do Khan alone, it was a thing we did together. Just about everything in my kids’ homeschooling was done together. They were never going to do much by way of formal learning independently.

When my elder son was around 16-years old we had to stop travelling, or even leaving the house, by the global pandemic. At this point, I was pretty unhappy with my lot and having our freedom removed, and just didn’t have it in me to shoulder the education of my kids alone.

I sought outside help. Both in giving the kids the required education, and giving them something to do through those extremely boring years. I delegated their maths education to online tutors and an online school. They were no longer homeschooled, but they were at home.

Most of the maths teaching from the online school wasn’t great. This is why we also paid for a maths tutor, she was fabulous. Both were teaching British iGCSE maths. But you can probably find ant country’s maths as required. The i is for international, by the way. It’s common for kids of any nationality to seek a British education and its all internationally recognised. I’ll warn you, it’s expensive.

To sit iGCSE maths the candidate does not have to be enrolled in a school. You can simply turn up at an exam centre as an independent candidate and sit the exams. They’re all over the world. The exams are expensive too. Do you need to sit the exams – probably not. It depends what that child wants to do in future. This was correct at the time my kids were sitting exams, for us, double check, govt. policies change and I can’t speak for everywhere in the world.

If you opt not to sit the exams at 16, 17, or 18, you can do them later. There are alternate pathways too. I know of one homeschooled 16-year-old who has just taken a “Certificate of Competence” in Maths and English to get into a college. There are loads of pathways, just do your research.

We chose to sit iGCSEs.

The next section is written today, as a mum of adult offspring.

Sitting iGCSE Maths after Homeschooling

The kids slotted in just fine into online maths classes. They were neither “behind” nor “ahead.” Each lesson was usually a stand-alone unit. I remember that their first class was vectors. This was completely new to them as it was to all the other kids in the class. They found it easy.

As we progressed to the harder maths and algebra, they did OK. Mum was heavily involved. I explained a lot of stuff. Mum wasn’t great at maths in school, I had a terrible teacher but I was in the “A” stream. I got a C grade. Most of the maths I ever memorised was long since forgotten. Despite a career in science.

So mum re-learned a lot of stuff alongside the kids and to help the kids. When you teach it to yourself, and understand what’s going on, it sticks much better. I got good at maths. You can do this too! Don’t stress. I barely understood anything of the maths I performed in school as a kid.

It would be very hard to pass a maths exam without some input from teachers. That goes for most subjects. What’s required in the exams today is probably very different to what you and I did in school.

The way the kids have to methodically work through any question, showing all their workings, is very formulaic. The teachers know what’s required. I didn’t. You could probably figure it out, but I was quite surprised by how things are done today. Do some research on that if you plan on your child sitting maths.

You absolutely need to practice on past papers. You should be able to find these online.

The maths exams are done and dusted, all good, no problems. I hope my little pep talk is useful to somebody out there. I think homeschooling is the way of the future. The numbers of homeschoolers in the world grows at a crazy rate. Crazy in a good way! Good luck and enjoy sharing in the totality of your kids’ childhoods.