Building Maths Confidence for Kids

The Year 4 maths confidence drop is real—especially for girls. Here is a 5-minute, zero-stress trick for times-table confidence.

I’ve got maths on the brain at the minute, we are making some really exciting progress on our “kids maths confidence programme”, which we’re doing in partnership with an amazing maths teacher, to help kids at the time where they often fall off the ladder, to regain confidence and actually like maths.

Having confidence that you “can do maths” is really empowering for kids, and then they will take that with them for the rest of their lives. It’s often around year four, you see kids, lots of girls especially, lose confidence in maths. One of the reasons for that if a child misses a concept in Year 2 or 3 (like place value or fractions), the Year 4 curriculum feels like trying to build a house on sand. Without intervention, they fall off the ladder and the other is it’s at this age they start getting timed tests.

The Gender Gap: Studies show that while boys and girls perform similarly in early primary maths, a "maths anxiety" gender gap emerges around ages 8 to 9 (Year 4). Girls are statistically more likely to report feeling "not good at maths," often driven by a societal stereotype that maths is a "boy subject" or from absorbing anxiety from adults around them.

I’ve seen this with my own daughter, who’s a little older now, but at the time, that is when everything kind of started to go downhill for her in terms of maths. It wasn’t until we did some intervention, at home, that we started to see progress for her and we want to give that kind of intervention to all kids that need it.

What I wanted to share was something really cool that me and my kids did last night. Yesterday we were working through our NEW maths program, talking about timetables and I was questioning about how how do we get kids to tackle times tables in a positive way, that works, because knowing them can really help, as it just makes everything faster.

We talked about this really simple technique and I just wanted to share it with you because I did it last night with my kids and it was amazing.

You can do it on a piece of paper, but to make it fun we did it while we were in the bath on the shower door…

• Pick a timetables e.g 7

• Work together to write it down e.g

  • 1x7 = 7

  • 2x7=14 etc

• Then say out loud together 7,14,21…84

• and then backwards 84,77,70…7

• Then talk about which ones you are happy with and rub / cross out the answers for these, we did ours on the shower door, so we could easily rub things out with a cloth:

  • 1x7 =

  • 2x7=

  • 3x7=21

  • 4x7=28…

• Then repeat crossing any new ones out we were confident in and then saying out loud together 7,14,21…84. Doing this focussed us in on the ones that we knew not the ones we didn’t.

• Do this again and again while its still fun (and helpful)

We worked through all the way so that we could do all the 7’s :-) and I now know 12x7 is 84. We high fived and then my daughter wanted to move onto 8’s so we did that too. It was great to see just this small intervention had a really positive impact on my youngest, just helping her to practice.

The Science Bit - Focusing on what they know, by crossing out the ones they already know, you are using a psychological technique called errorless learning and building inner confidence. Instead of staring at a page of things they are failing at, the visual focus shifts to a board full of things they have mastered. This protects their confidence.

This is something you can do at home and something that we are building into our kids maths confidence programme. Small changes like these are what you can do to help to build confidence and resilience when taking on new stuff.

If you are someone who’s kids need support with maths or your are a maths teacher or tutor and would like to know more, please get in touch hello@happyconfidentkids.com