Teaching kids can be fun, which is also the case if you are patient enough to teach them the same concept today, tomorrow and the next day until it sticks into their minds. The kids will love you; so will their parents because kids will speak well of you at home. Your satisfaction will be great especially if elementary mathematics teaching is your calling in life. It is a great thing to watch the young minds adopt an idea, digest it and practice it until it becomes their way of life. Math is about numbers and numbers are the first thing that kids learn as they grow up. It is therefore of the utmost importance for the first lessons to be induced in the best way possible so that the child does not come to hate math earlier on. The very first lessons should be done with the use of examples and terms that children can understand. As you hone their basic counting, addition, subtraction, division and multiplication skills, remember to use things like food, sweets and candy as references. These are things that the young mind can relate with because they must have had some, at least at one time or the other in their short lives.

Before you can get to the basics, let them know how to count with food materials, adding or subtracting. Later, introduce addition that is a bit more complex and then multiplication without decimals; but later on according to how they have done in previous lessons, you can introduce decimal points. The secret here is to let the kids sing the numbers aloud as they work. Let them think aloud during the lesson while at the same time, you note those who lag behind to extra-coach them so that they can catch up with the others. As they progress, you can introduce number comparisons, allowing them to pick the greatest number or vice versa from a set of numbers. Teach them how to add two numbers and then three numbers up to 12. Later show them how to recognize different mathematical signs and what they mean, especially the equal (=) sign; that means same or equivalent. After that , the place values of numbers, filling in the missing numbers in increasing or decreasing series, greater than or less than signs and later, it should be basic math words or word problems, followed at close heels by fractions as well as actual measurements where the students can measure and relate different lengths to each other.