We sent out a box to a parent who works with home educators. We were keen to know what they though, and how they got on!
As the sister of a wonderful Maths teacher – Mrs Shaw as she is known to her students, this subject was never my strong point.
While I do use some forms of maths all the time in my business, I’ve never had to worry about using ‘sin, cos and tan’ or Pythagoras’ Theorem etc since leaving school.
However, now I have a daughter in Year 8, I want to support her with her homework, which means I must learn high school maths all over again! What I don’t want is for her is to dislike the subject in the way I did in school. So, I needed to find an enjoyable way to make maths fun and interesting.
This is where ‘Tutor in a Box’ comes in and ticks all the boxes.
My daughter was very excited about opening the beautifully presented box and we were both very impressed by the quality of the contents.
The first thing she spotted was the ‘I love maths’ badge pack, she loved these. The next item was Numenko in a Bag, this is a number game similar to Bananagrams, where we as the players work independently, the same time as everyone else, building our own equations, and competing to use all of our allotted tiles the fastest! We’ve already had a lot of fun with this game.
Also, in the box there were some motivational cards, coloured pencils, a daily maths calendar with maths questions and of course some maths lessons, all laid out in a fun and very thoughtful way.
These lessons have already greatly improved both mine and my daughter’s understanding of some important math topics.
Now if I could just find a time machine to take me back to my school years, I would definitely find maths more enjoyable.
The great mathematician Paul Halmos once said ‘the only way to learn mathematics is to do mathematics’ and having discovered ‘Tutor in a Box’ this is a great way of doing just this, while having fun.
This review was provided by Gill Cleeve who works with home educators. Like the others who reviewed our boxes, we didn’t pay her to say nice stuff and these are her own (and her daughters) thoughts.
