Your child, like many other children, struggles with math fundamentals. Math fundamentals come up and will continue to come up in every math problem your child will ever encounter so it is critical that they continuously review them, to remain confident and fluent in their fundamental skills, at any level. Shockingly, many teachers incorrectly assume that fundamentals are easy – and don’t explain them. As a result, many children don’t learn them well. Hence, your child likely never did. Or perhaps they learned them a long time ago and didn’t get a chance to refresh their knowledge and practice them recently.

Many teachers simply assume that children already know the fundamentals and don’t see the necessity to review them at all – which is a huge mistake!

Your child needs to independently practice the fundamentals that pertain to the concepts they are currently learning because, unfortunately, they won’t get that practice in class. Most fundamentals aren’t very challenging but they often do have variations, and they tend to be detailed. That’s why your child needs to solve a large number of examples, to gain confidence and speed. Math fundamentals occur in every single math problem your child will ever encounter so it is absolutely critical that they master them, to gain high level of confidence and proficiency.

After they master solving pure fundamental problems, your child should also understand and practice applications of fundamentals, to bridge the gap between pure math operations and how they work in multi-step problems. Most children skip this step and end up struggling.