All students have at least one subject they struggle with, and every homeschool will have (at least) one tricky subject. In our homeschool, maths was the problem.
According to National Numeracy, 26% of parents worry about supporting their children with maths, 20% say maths homework causes tensions at home and 17% of women say their children’s maths homework has brought them to tears.
There’s a misconception that in order to home educate, you must be academic across the board and, therefore, these statistics wouldn’t apply: That’s not the case. Amongst homeschooling parents, maths is the subject parents most worry about. As parents, the importance of mathematical literacy is drilled into our very psyche and we worry as home educators that the maths education we provide to our children may not be comprehensive enough to give them the start in life they deserve. And in our homeschool, maths was the tricky subject.
Early primary school maths was easy enough to teach. Times tables, basic geometry, addition + subtraction are all easily teachable through games & repetition. Once we’d moved past the basics and ‘real’ maths lessons had to start though, Teacher-Mum + a textbook didn’t make anyone happy. The problem wasn’t the textbooks or the enthusiasm of the students; the problem was me.
Across the homeschool subjects our children study, I am their main teacher. A lot of that teaching is scaffolded teaching – using teacher support documents to facilitate classroom lessons – but it is (mostly) me + our children + lesson resources. It works well. A trained teacher who scored top grades at GCSEs across the board, I am (pretty) sure that I am capable of teaching them to the same level. Maths, however is a different story.
The problem
A combination of bad teachers and exam stress led me to believe I was inherently bad at the subject. When it came to teaching maths to our children, the fear that they too would feel ‘bad at maths’ ironically led to just that. Whereas every other homeschool lesson had a relaxed atmosphere in the classroom, maths changed the tension in the room. Even though I was competently teaching them – using the textbooks to take them through each concept/working out the answers etc – I wasn’t doing it with confidence, and each maths lesson in our homeschool felt stressful: They could feel my stress.
After one (embarrassingly simple) lesson, when they and I ended up in tears, I realised this was not going to work. Instead of empowering my children, I was eroding their desire to be curious about maths and without that, the subject was simply a chore. Something had to give.
We switched to online programmes instead of Teacher-Mum-led lessons and the change in our children was almost instantaneous. Within a few weeks, they were more confident and I wished I’d outsourced the subject earlier.
What we did to fix it
We’d already been using the book ‘How to be Good at Maths’ as a curriculum plan, so they started online maths lessons using Maths Factor which aligns with the teaching method of the book. Carol Vorderman is a much better maths teacher than me! Our homeschoolers were able to work through the course independently. If they needed help, I didn’t need to be a ‘maths teacher’ only a ‘support teacher’, guiding them by watching the tutorials and figuring it out together.
Our homeschoolers supplemented with workbooks to give extra practice for the maths skills they’d covered and once Maths Factor was completed, they moved on to IXL. Many years later, they’re now using Khan Academy and my role is still in a support role rather than as their primary teacher for the subject.
AI can help you teach
Thankfully, it’s now 2025 and AI exists. As their (KS3 level) support-teacher for maths, I can rely on the support of AI. Resources like Microsoft Maths Solver are excellent learning tools to support home educators in the classroom.
Using this type of AI, I can help them work through problems step-by-step – essentially re-learning alongside them. Using AI maths tools gives a homeschool teacher in-lesson back-up support if learners ask to work through an example of their own making or if the lesson they’ve just studied hasn’t fully clicked.
When using teacher-textbooks to help support your child’s learning, if they don’t understand once you’ve finished the textbook example-answer/walk-through, you (as their teacher) are on your own. With AI, if the first example doesn’t help explain the problem/solution, we simply ask it to generate another and continue until the student understands.
Of course, it’s still slightly stressful (for me), explaining something I might not 100% feel competent to explain without the supported learning tools, but that doesn’t matter. Because our homeschoolers know they’re not reliant on me to explain the maths, they’re able to relax, trusting that eventually, we’ll get there.
Tutoring + past papers
Tutoring helps to fill any learning gaps and can boost a homeschooler’s confidence in a subject. Online tutoring sites like Preply, which connect pupils with qualified tutors, personalise a tutoring plan that helps students reach their learning goals. Trial lessons to ensure the child and tutor communicate well are incredibly important for tutoring and Preply facilitates this seamlessly (& affordably!). For a homeschool maths programme, tutoring can be a useful tool to ensure your home learners are confident in the basics before moving onto more complex topics, or to focus in on tricky concepts.
Past exam papers, as for all subjects, are a fantastic learning resource. Regularly working through past maths exam papers – starting at lower levels and working up – is not only great practise of the maths homeschoolers are learning, but it also familiarises them with the exam format which removes stress during the actual exams.
This combination of repeated practice, supported learning via online courses, tutoring support and AI explanations is proving an effective maths learning programme.
Maths in our homeschool now
The irony is that as our homeschoolers have progressed through their maths education, I’ve overcome my fear of the subject, becoming more confident and a better maths teacher as a result. Sometimes homeschooling benefits us as much as our homeschoolers & they’re always, always watching.
Somehow it’s okay for people to chuckle about not being good at math. Yet, if I said “I never learned to read,” they’d say I was an illiterate dolt.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, American astrophysicist and author
Instead of telling themselves they’re ‘bad at maths’, our learners tell themselves they just haven’t learnt it..yet.
On top of learning maths in their homeschool lessons, our homeschoolers have begun studying mathematicians, watching fun Ted talks about mathematics and it’s applications; as their science lessons become more complex, they see how science and maths are intrinsically connected which urges them to study the former to better understand the latter and, building a house – literally – showed them how useful maths is in a very practical sense.
Maths is no longer a homeschool subject of doom, but even with this revised, effective formula, math lessons still don’t always go swimmingly. Some days, lessons are confusing and extra challenging for our learners, and some days I don’t have the patience required to tackle complicated problems and the complexities of pushing my kids, who are also my pupils, through a lesson they’re struggling with.
On these days, in those lessons when tensions are rising, we call time on the class. Taking a break to give everyone a little space to reset will always be more productive in the long run than pushing through a negative atmosphere lesson. Ultimately, protecting our relationship as parent-child is more important than completing that lesson as teacher-pupil. By recognising their need to stop (for now), I remind them that this homeschool thing is a team effort and they are more important than the lessons we tick boxes to say we’ve done.
N.B. There’s a list of books and additional resources we’ve found useful teaching homeschool maths here.