Kumon Math – How to Get Your Child to Complete Their Kumon Math Workbooks

The Kumon math program is a highly effective way to increase your child’s math ability and to improve their school math grades. However, one of the major problems that parents face with the program is that many students find the booklets repetitive and boring and put up a great deal of resistance to completing the work.

For many students this is particularly the case when they begin a new Kumon level and the booklets become harder and require more concentration. This is why the Kumon math program begins with an easy starting level, whereby the student begins the program at a level that they can complete quickly and easily therefore gaining confidence in their own abilities. It is inevitable though that as the student moves through the program they eventually encounter a new level that they find more taxing. This is when many students become resistant to completing their work.

One of the first ways to overcome this problem is to consider whether the student is struggling so much that their workload has become too heavy. When encountering a new level some students find the work so difficult that they can take up to an hour to complete a single booklet, particularly if they are struggling to focus. In a case such as this it can be beneficial to break the booklets into two parts and only complete half a booklet a day. This makes the work seem less overwhelming and may help to motivate the student. When they are then able to complete the work in the standard completion time they can be moved back up to doing a full booklet daily.

One of the methods that Kumon uses to motivate students is to award them stickers on a chart for the completion of their workbooks. When their chart is complete they are awarded a small prize. This works very well for small children for whom the prizes are often a great source of excitement but is less successful with older students who may not be motivated by such techniques. In this case parents can often successfully identify some sort of achievement and reward structure that will work for their child. The goals for this can be set by the parent in conjunction with the Kumon instructor; an example would be the successful completion of a level. The parents can then identify what reward would be appropriate. This might be an amount of money, an outing, or another privilege that the parent thinks is a suitable reward for the goal reached.

One of the objectives of Kumon is that students develop advanced study skills and are able to study independently. This is best achieved when the student really takes ownership of their own learning. One of the best ways to ensure this objective is achieved is to give the student responsibility, under guidance commensurate with their age, to mark and correct their own work. This not only makes them find the mistakes that they make, it also requires them to identify where they went wrong with the problem and to correct it accordingly.

By using the above methods it should be possible to get even a student who is highly resistant to using the Kumon Method to take responsibility for their learning, to complete their booklets in the standard completion time and to do so with the most accuracy possible.