How long should maths practice at home be?

Five to ten minutes a day for primary-age children, rather than one long weekly session. Little and often is more effective because the point is recall from memory, and finishing while your child still feels successful is what makes them willing to come back tomorrow.

My child cries over maths homework. What should I do?

Stop the session and change the size of the task, not the mood. Ask them to do the first question only, out loud, with you. If they cannot start it at all, the work is too hard for now — go down a level and rebuild the underlying skill, because a task your child cannot begin is a diagnosis, not a discipline problem.

How do I know whether the work is too hard or too easy?

Watch how they get it wrong. Several wrong in a row with slow, hesitant working usually means too hard — step back. Quick, confident, bored-looking accuracy means too easy — move up or add a time challenge. A few errors with explanations that make sense means the level is right.

Still Struggling to Get Your Child to Practise Maths?

If getting your child to practise maths ends in an argument more often than it ends in a finished page, the problem is almost never your child's attitude to numbers. It is usually the size of the task, and what is at stake while they do it. Those two things are much easier to change than a personality.

Shrink it until it is easy to say yes to. Five minutes and five questions, not a whole page. A task small enough to finish while your child still feels capable is what produces the offer to come back tomorrow. If you are unsure how small, go smaller than feels sensible — a child who completes three questions happily has learned more than one who abandons twenty in tears.

Take the marking out of it. Nothing stalls recall practice faster than the fear of being wrong in front of a parent. Do not correct mid-flow; note what went wrong and come back to it later, or hold it for a review. Then build in something your child can win against: their own time from yesterday, their own score, a target they set themselves. Competing with a personal best is motivating; competing with a parent or a sibling usually is not.

Same time, same place. Motivation is expensive and habit is cheap. If maths practice happens at the same point every day — before breakfast, after lunch, straight after the school day — it stops being a decision you both have to make and becomes part of the furniture. Decisions are what create the argument.

Separate "cannot do it" from "will not do it". This is the most useful diagnostic you have. If your child is getting several wrong in a row, working slowly and hesitating, the work is too hard — go down a level and rebuild the skill underneath. If they are fast, accurate and bored, it is too easy — move up or add a time challenge. Genuinely not wanting to start, while being able to do the first question with a nudge, is usually about the blank start rather than the maths, and doing the first one out loud together fixes it more often than any pep talk.

Show them the progress. Maths practice is invisible work. A simple chart, a streak of days, or a topic list that gets ticked off gives your child something to look at that is not a mark. Seeing a skill move from "not yet" to "secure" is what shifts a child from tolerating practice to asking for it.

Vary the format, not the skill. Same skill, different surface: cards on the floor, questions asked in the car, a timer, a dice game, a whiteboard instead of a pencil. This is not cheating or dumbing it down — it is the same recall, practised without the white-knuckle association that a worksheet has built up.

One more thing worth saying plainly: never use maths practice as a punishment or remove it as a privilege. A child who experiences maths as a consequence will not practise it voluntarily, however well designed the tasks are. On OjasaLearn, practice is short, adaptive and self-marked — the difficulty moves with your child rather than against them, and progress is tracked topic by topic, which takes the guessing out of whether today was a step forward.