Reviewing the Math Literature: Recommendations for Practice, Policy, and Research
The Family Math Roadmap Implementation Project
This report answers the questions: why is early math important, what role do families play, and what should educators keep in mind to best support families’ engagement in math learning?

Family Math Toolkit
PBS SoCal
This comprehensive toolkit developed by PBS SoCal offers 350 multi-media resources in English and Spanish for educators, including: simple overviews of family math; games, videos, and activities across many math topics; and resources for leading your own family math workshop.

This video by the Erikson Institute offers testimonials from teachers and school leaders about the benefits of hosting a Family Math Night. The Julia Robinson Mathematics Festival (JRMF) focuses on bringing math fun to schools, libraries, and other venues through math festivals and math exploration. JRMF hosts festivals, offers a math-festival-in-a-box option, and shares online math puzzles and games. MathFests are offered free of charge to Title I schools upon request.

The Young Mathematicians initiative at EDC offers 50 math games for home and school to explore, with printable materials, directions, and videos available in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.  Likewise, the Early Family Math website offers dozens of free family math games, puzzles, and activities developed by math educators.

When families read together with their children, it can promote math as well as literacy. To help you select math-themed storybooks, consider this guidance from the DREME network, or visit websites with curated lists like these books created by Bedtime Math, these storybooks featuring patterns by NAEYC, these “small talk” board books that encourage math talk with little ones, and these math storybooks identified by PBS SoCal that celebrate Latin heritage.

This “ideas article” by the Early Math Collaborative at Erikson Institute shares tips for making laundry day a special time for family math! And this toolkit for families, developed by parent leaders at the Center for Family Math, shows you how to explore math in everyday tasks around the home. An associated resource provides guidance to families and parent leaders to talk about and advocate for family math in their schools and communities. Both resources are also available in Spanish, here and here.

The Measure! Everything! App, developed by MathTalk, can be downloaded free on the Apple App Store, is available in English and Spanish, and uses Augmented Reality experiences to help young children and their families explore math in their own homes, backyards, schools, and communities. Likewise, LearnLead offers resources for finding math in the built environment and with museums (preK-3rd). For older students, this video illustrates the practice of a Math Trail, where students observe their surrounding community and create math problems for others to solve.

Simple Family Math explainers and resources in multiple languages and/or with visual or infographic formatting can help communicate the why and how of Family Math to families. Here is a STEM-focused one-pager for young children by the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce, and a multilingual one from ZenoMath. This TedEd video on math anxiety and growth mindset is also a great visual explainer. The Math Narrative Project is a comprehensive messaging research project that shares perspectives on math learning from adolescents, their parents, and their teachers, and offers recommendations, including for a parent audience, on how to communicate about math with their teenagers.

Parents often report confusion with “new math” and math standards, so resources that explain math standards and how parents can support learning aligned with them can be helpful. For example, LAUSD offers a parent workshop explaining Common Core mathematical standards and what parents can say and do to support standards-aligned mathematical learning. Also, in its Inside Mathematics project, The Dana Center at the University of Texas at Austin defines Common Core mathematical practice standards and shares short video clips that demonstrate for educators and parents what these standards look like in K-12th-grade classrooms. Finally, Learning Heroes has this “readiness” check for parents to see if their child is on track in math and literacy.

Stanford’s DREME network offers Family Math Kits in English and Spanish for families wanting to promote their young children’s math learning through playful activities at home. Kits are also available in Arabic and Portuguese versions that you can share on request.