THE TAPIAS

Pat and Jake Tapia of Rodeo, California, still remember the frustration of trying to explain the multiplication tables to their son Brian. "I tried as many ways as I could to explain it number-wise," Pat says, "but I never seemed to make it clearer." Twenty years later, the Tapias tried a new math approach, one that seems to be working with their three granddaughters, ages 10, 11 and 13.

Instead of agonizing over abstract mathematical concepts as she did with her son, Pat used macaroni to help them visualize how three groups of three add up to nine.

That tip was one of many offered at a Family Math seminar that Pat took at her granddaughters' school. Developed by the University of California, the national program shows families how to integrate math into their daily lives in interesting ways.

Instead of the tedium of flash cards, parents learn to help kids practice mental arithmetic by assigning escalating dollar values to each letter of the alphabet and adding up the "price" of everyone's name. Circumference and diameter can be taught using ribbons and lids from jars; real-life story problems are used to teach problem solving and logic.

Pat has taught the girls fractions by doubling or halving recipes. She has also had the girls calculate the price difference between buying ice cream from the ice cream truck, and getting it at the grocery store. "They figured out that if they bought the ice cream and the cones at the grocery store, they had enough money for ice cream every day for a week," Pat says. "It was good for math and economics."

Jake came up with a math exercise on road trips, making a game of using numbers on license plates. One person will find a 21, another a 5, and the third has to figure out how to subtract or add those numbers and find the answer--either 16 or 26--on another plate. The girls also use road maps and speed limits to determine how long it will take the family to reach their destination, an activity that has significantly cut down on those endless "are we there yet?" queries.

Not only are the girls comfortable with math, they're also having fun playing against their grandparents. "When Jessica came much closer than me in estimating our heights in centimeters," says Pat, "she felt great about getting a better answer than her grandmother."

Barbara Rowley, a contributing editor at FAMILYFUN, lives in Big Sky, Montana.