Keeping Your High School Math Skills Sharp Over the Summer

Prepping for graduation and heading off to university is a big stressor for many kids in high school. Unfortunately, high school students will have the added challenge this year of trying to overcome the small lapse in their education due to the situation with COVID. Fortunately, we’re here to help! With a little extra work this summer, high school children can start the 2020/2021 school year stronger than ever.

Here’s how to get some extra work in for high school math:

Keep practicing practically: It’s not silly to mention; the first and best way to stay in practice is to be sure to use your skills. There’s dozens of daily situations in real life that call for math.

• Do a little baking and cooking – only, be sure to double (or triple!) that recipe in your head as you go.
• Working with money – make change, make budgets, calculate interest payments on loans and savings accounts (a super important real-life skill once in university).
• Do some other fun experiments – play with probability, use physics formulae to calculate how high up you would have to be for objects to reach terminal velocity, use trigonometry to measure the height of buildings and trees!

Audit a free course from a university: Many of the Ivy League schools in the USA, like Harvard and MIT, and even a few in Canada put up general education courses online – free to everyone. You can take courses such as Introduction to Machine Learning, AP Calculus and pre-calculus, A-level mathematics, and math essentials (a great one for parents who want a refresher!). Some even have live classes that start in July. You may be able to register still!

Bonus: For a small fee, some of these programs allow you to get written course credit that you may be able to transfer as credit to your university later, if you want.

Khan Academy: If you’re struggling with a specific concept or a particular kind of math, Khan Academy is great for being able to hone in on exactly what you want to work on, and comes complete with the ability to test. But… it’s also pretty helpful if you want to work ahead into the math you’ll be covering for next year!

Test preparedness sites: There’s many online sites that offer testing preparedness for university. While the value of these sites as test-preparedness may vary, they do have a lot of great free practice questions to keep you sharp (or at least, help you test and find your weaknesses)!

Check in with one of our tutors: Not everyone learns the same way, and you may find self-education difficult to navigate. That’s perfectly okay. If you would prefer getting some guidance on education from a teacher, or simply a little extra help, our tutors have trained or worked as teachers following the Ontario school curriculum. They know what you need to know!

Here’s to making this coming fall a successful one. Happy summer!