Do-It-Yourself Math Help

As your student heads into middle school or high school math classes, an interesting change takes place in the curriculum. It catches many students unaware, and their grades can suddenly start to slip. At the upper levels of math, teachers begin to assume that students already know certain basic skills and they eliminate the quick reviews of foundational skills before they tackle new material. Your student might well be relying on these habitual reviews of skills like dividing decimals, computation with negative numbers, and finding common denominators, so this change can wreak havoc with the math grade. Suddenly, students need to (gasp!) remember material from previous math classes and apply it to accomplish the next mathematical challenge. Help your child prepare for this change by creating a personalized math reference journal.

A math reference journal is simply a notebook with directions to all of the troublesome math skills written out in step-by-step format that your student has penned. Because the directions are in his or her own words, they will be more memorable. Step-by-step example problems that coincide with each phase of the directions are a must, too. Once created, the math reference journal will be an invaluable resource for studying and for quick math help when problems are difficult.

Start with a notebook. Any kind will do, but a ring binder will allow the greatest flexibility since you can easily add or rearrange pages. Dividers or tabs are a nice touch that can help with organization, as well, but they are certainly not necessary.

Make a list of troublesome skills that seem to trip your student up when they resurface each year. This will serve as a to-do list for creating the pages of the reference journal. For each skill listed, set your child to work making a page that gives directions for the task. It’s perfectly fine to use references, like textbooks or sites like Purplemath.com or Hippocampus.org, to ensure that the correct steps are being noted. However, make sure your student is not copying directly from the resource. The directions should be in his or her original prose, and the example problems should be unique as well. This will help the student better recall each process and also make the directions more understandable when the reference book is used at a later date.

Of course, every student's reference journal will be different, but here are some ideas of topics that many will need or want to include:

For Middle School Students

• simplifying fractions
• finding common denominators
• adding/subtracting/multiplying/dividing fractions
• decimal place value
• rounding numbers
• adding/subtracting/multiplying/dividing decimals
• solving 2-step equations
• conversion among metric units
• solving ratio, percent and rate problems
• finding area, perimeter and volume of standard figures
• computation with positive and negative integers

For High School Students:

• basic properties, such as commutative, associative, distributive
• recognizing linear equations
• forms of linear equations
• solving linear equations
• solving systems of linear equations
• working with polynomials
• working with quadratic equations
• working with radicals and roots
• properties of angles
• properties of triangles
• construction of figures
• proofs

When guiding students about which topics to include in the reference journal, review tests and assignments to see which skills are troublesome. Help the student find resources with information about how to use the concept, and then check the step-by-step directions written by the student and the example problems created by the student to be sure that everything is correct and clear. Keep the pages in the reference notebook, and encourage the student to refer to them when doing assignments or studying. This personalized guide will be a grade-booster for years to come!