When my kids were younger, the curriculum that their school used was more about the aha!s and connections than about rote recipes.  I volunteered in one&#x27;s first grade math class where they spent 20 minutes of the 45 minute math period learning to draw puppies and kitties so they could answer the question, &quot;Sue has 15 puppies and kitties.  How many of each does she have?&quot; The goal was to get the kids to come up with every combination from 0 puppies and 15 kitties through 15 puppies and 0 kitties, and first graders are still mostly concrete thinkers and need those pictures.<p>At this level, getting 3+2=5 was MUCH less important than being able to explain in writing that 3 apples and two bananas added up to a bunch of fruits in words.  4, 6, 8, 5, whatever.  Alas, they never got 3+2=5 hardwired in this curriculum.  But they were better artists for it!<p>And my kids did <i>not</i> learn math, because the curriculum was more about writing than math and explaining reasoning (I called it &quot;math for people who don&#x27;t like math and would rather write about it than do it&quot;).  So in elementary school, I taught my kids math using Singapore Math curriculum and let the school do its thing so it was balanced, and I volunteered weekly in math during the elementary school years so I was on top of what they were learning and how.<p>In addition, we always did math at home in informal ways without being explicit about it, from counting lug nuts on cars when they were toddlers through guessing the color of the next car to go by the stop sign on our walks to estimating which box of cereal was cheapest without a calculator to noting that the arrival rate at a traffic signal wasn&#x27;t random in one direction because the only way cars could get to it was by going through another signal.  Heck, even counting in binary using the 3 lights above an airplane row on visits to the grandparents - Look, with three lights I can only count to 8! And now with high schoolers and college kids, math jokes like log(fu) = log(f) + log(u) are the height of hilarity, or at least lighten the mood at exam time.<p>Point is - there is &quot;studying math&quot; (with whatever curriculum and rubrics) and there is &quot;playing with math.&quot;  As a parent, especially with younger kids, I found that it was great to establish both.  Math isn&#x27;t a &quot;thing&quot;, it&#x27;s part of life.