Top 5 tips for teaching life skills maths

Teaching life skills maths to older students in high school and adult settings takes some careful planning. Some students may have previous negative experiences with maths, while others may have had disruptions to their schooling or be coming back to education later in life. Let's explore some tips for helping you work more easily with older students when you are teaching life skills maths.

Relationships are key for life skills maths classes

Building positive relationships with your students in life skills maths classes helps you understand the barriers to learning, as well as the strategies students already use to manage them. Many older learners will have previous classroom experiences which shape how they feel about maths and numeracy learning. A positive relationship helps you understand the challenges each learner has in learning maths, and puts you on the right path to work with them to manage them. Take time time to find out how learners like to receive feedback, what information format they prefer and how they like to practice new skills.

Strong relationships help life skills maths learners build their skills and confidence

Understand cognitive load

Cognitive load is the amount of mental work we need to do to complete a task. When it comes to life skills maths classes, cognitive load is important because there are so many discrete pieces of information learners need to manage. Think about a maths problem or scenario. Students need to unpack the question or problem, find the maths, choose the best strategy or tool, apply it, remember the question and answer it in the form you have asked. We can reduce the amount of cognitive load in lots of different ways:

• Adding visual cues

• Reducing extra information

• Highlighting the most important steps

• Using a simple worked example

• Reducing the reading and writing demands of the task

Making maths meaningful

Maths that only gets used in the classroom is not much use to anyone. Maths which relates to real world scenarios and helps solve problems that actually occur is much more useful. As students get older, they often prefer maths tasks that make sense in the context of their own lives. They like to know how maths can help them find a recreation or sports activity, understand a membership plan, find an address, use a timetable or make a budget to help them save money. Maths which holds real meaning and relates to the real world is more useful and is likely to be retained for longer.

Working with real world maths helps learners link classroom learning to everyday experiences

Age appropriate resources

Although some life skills maths learners are operating at a skill level that would align with junior students, this doesn't mean they will enjoy cute pictures of kittens, smiley faces and stars on their worksheets. If your life skills maths students are teenagers, look for options that reflect them in scenarios, show similar aged people in imagery and use language that they can relate to. Some teen and adult learners enjoy humour, so you can add cartoons and captions to help make tasks memorable without being insulting. Anchor charts and visual displays are helpful in supporting age appropriate teaching. You can subtly remind students about the process to use to solve a problem or reinforce important vocabulary without highlighting if a learner has forgotten something you have taught previously. Anchor charts are also a great way of co-creating and celebrating the work you have done together with students.

Life skills maths curriculum resources take the hard work out of preparing age appropriate activities for older learners

Simple steps

Breaking down a maths question or problem into simple steps helds reduce the cognitive load. It also works for letting you see where a student is struggling with a concept, as you can identify the points in a process where they can complete the steps, and where they need support. Use clear examples so students can see each step laid out with visual cues, and without the extra visual clutter that comes from too much information shared all at once. Add tips, visual prompts or photos to help the steps make sense.

As your life skills maths learners gain in skills, knowledge and confidence, you can gradually release responsibility so they are more in charge of their own learning pathway. Continue to provide feedback, collect examples of completed tasks for feedback and celebrate the work your learners have achieved throughout the year.