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10th grade math tips: Here's how to help your student

Here's how you can help your 10th-grader with math outside of the classroom.

Hoping to help your 10th-grader with math skills? Here are some basic tips that experts suggest.

Access online resources

For many parents, the biggest challenge they face helping their child with high school math is that the material is too difficult for them to easily help out. Familiarize yourself with the range of online resources, like Khan Academy and IXL that provide your child with plenty of opportunities to review the concepts they are studying, take tutorials, and do practice problems. Even if you can’t solve the problems yourself, you can help steer your child toward helpful resources.

Find a math mentor

If your child is struggling with math and doesn’t understand what use it could ever be to her, it might help for their to have a mentor. This could be a friend or family member who uses math in their work, such as an accountant or an engineer or a programmer. Enlist this person to talk to your child to help to demystify math for her.

Encourage persistence

Success in math has a lot to do with taking the time to understand a problem, thinking about different ways of solving it, and persevering if initial attempts to solve it fail. Encourage your child to stick it out with math that your child finds challenging and to seek help if your child needs it.

Subscribe to magazines that feature math

Subscribe to magazines like Wired or Popular Science that cover subjects related to math in an entertaining and informative format.

Watch movies that feature math

Plan a family movie-watching night around a film that features math, like "A Beautiful Mind," Moneyball" or "The Da Vinci Code."

Highlight real-world examples of math in the news

"Highlight examples of the real-world use of the math concepts that your child is learning when you’re watching the news together. Some are obvious, such as statistics and poll numbers that are often cited, and others are less so. Recent news stories that involved math included the complicated operation to right the capsized Costa Concordia cruise ship and Felix Baumgartner’s record-setting jump to earth from the stratosphere. Encourage your child do further research into stories that interest them and learn more about the math that was involved.

Encourage investing

Consider giving your child a small sum of money to invest in the stock market. If that’s not an option, have them open a “fantasy” account and track its ups and downs as though your child were investing real money.

Ask your child to teach you

Ask your child to teach you the math they are studying. The best way to learn a concept is often to teach it to someone else, and verbalizing the ideas they are learning helps to clarify them for your child.

Discuss math-related career options

Encourage your child to explore ways in which math is used in different careers. How do doctors use math? Engineers? Bankers? What is your child starting to think of as career goals? Help them explore, by researching online or talking to other adults, the role of math in the fields they are starting to consider.

Highlight math in sports

Sports provide an engaging way of exploring a host of mathematical concepts. Any hard-core baseball fan knows that the game can’t truly be appreciated without an understanding of some essential statistics, like a player’s batting average and runs batted in. Football is also full of statistics, such as the percentage of passes a quarterback completed. If your child is passionate about a sport, she’ll enjoy exploring it through math.

To find out what your 10th-grader will be learning in math class, check out our 10th grade math skills page.

Parent Toolkit resources were developed by NBC News Learn with the help of subject-matter experts, including Joyce Epstein, Director, Center on School, Family and Community Partnerships, Johns Hopkins University; Pamela Mason, Program Director/Lecturer on Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education; and Denise Walston, Director of Mathematics, Council of the Great City Schools, and align with the Common Core State Standards.