More Maths for Mums and Dads

Book excerpt: A brilliant guide for parents through the troubled waters of GCSE maths - and to help you to help your teenager to feel confident and even enjoy it, especially when studying at home. In their first, bestselling, book Maths for Mums and Dads Rob Eastaway and Mike Askew helped you and your child make sense of the new methods and topics covered in primary school maths. But as your child embarks on secondary school, two new issues arise. First, in the build-up to GCSE, school children begin to do maths that you probably have never encountered before – or if you have, you never really got it in the first place, and have long since forgotten. Factorising? Finding the locus? Solving for x? Probability distributions? What do these even mean? More Maths for Mums and Dads gives you all the ammunition to help you to help your teenager get to grips with and feel more confident about – and hopefully even enjoy – GCSE maths. It covers in straightforward and easy-to-follow terms the maths your child will encounter in the build up to GCSE, in many cases gives practical and fun examples of where the maths crops up in the real world. In addition, the authors introduce the notion of estimation and coin a new term, Zequals. Using the Zequals method will help develop your teenager's feel for numbers, which in turn could transform their experience and enjoyment of everyday maths.