Why Should You Hire a Private Maths Tutor for Your Child?

  Maths is one of the key skills a child needs to master on their journey through school. Even if they aren't taking a scientific direction, good maths grades are likely to impress a university or employer — and, of course, maths has many essential practical uses in life. The reality, though, is that many children struggle with maths at school. Is your child one of those? One solution may be to hire a private maths tutor for your child.

Why Do Some Children Struggle with Maths?

 It's possible, of course, that the maths teaching at your child's school may be poor. If this isn't the case, though, there are two main reasons for children struggling with maths. One is that maths depends very heavily on building from existing knowledge, like stacking blocks on top of one another. If a child hasn't grasped an earlier stage, it'll be almost impossible to understand what's being taught now. Unfortunately, the structure of school education makes it difficult to help the child go back to that earlier stage.

 Secondly, some children suffer from the learning disability dyscalculia, making it difficult to understand numbers and mathematical concepts. Like dyslexia, this can be overcome, but it needs intensive one-to-one work with the child, a luxury most schools can't provide.

How to Recognise Your Child Is Struggling with Maths

There are many ways to recognise that your child is having problems with maths, but here are some of the main ones:

• If your child expresses negative feelings about maths or becomes anxious about it, it might show they're struggling.
• If your child's maths grades are consistently lower than other subjects, it shows their problems are specific to maths.
• If your child has problems using maths concepts in real life (e.g. the number of days till an event or calculating money) this may be a sign of problems.
• If your child continues to count on their fingers as they get older, it could be a sign they're struggling with mental arithmetic.

How Could a Private Maths Tutor Help Your Child?

 If you've identified that your child is struggling with maths, you could certainly offer help yourself, such as helping with their homework or playing fun maths-based games with them. However, unless you're a trained maths teacher, there's only so much you can do. A private maths tutor has a number of advantages over your child's teachers at school, but the main one is that they can teach one to one, instead of having to teach 30-40 children at the same time. This means they can focus on the issues your child is having trouble with and take as long as it needs solving those problems to allow your child to move on.

 It also means the tutor can adapt lessons to your child's own preferred learning style. Some children, for instance, do well learning the concepts of maths and then applying them, while others are better at understanding practical problems and then learning the concepts behind them. A private tutor can adapt to whichever works better. If your child's problem with maths is identified as dyscalculia, they'll need a substantial amount of personal input. Although not all private maths tutors are qualified to help children with dyscalculia, you shouldn't have trouble finding one that is.

 So how do you find the right private maths tutor to help your child catch up and achieve good grades? Register at TutorExtra, where you'll be able to look through the maths tutors available and identify the one you need.