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My children are like me in many ways, one of which is their love of sports. I have utilised this love of sport as a way of helping them to improve their maths and will explain how I do this in this article. Playing the sports themselves is also very good for them as a way of keeping them fit and away from the television, which most children watch far too much of in my opinion.

I will use my five year old son as an example of how I use different sports to help him with his maths. I will never forget the first time I thought about including maths in a sport. I basically did it just by chance, for example it was not exactly planned. My son loves playing cricket and originally we would take a bat and ball to a local park and use the dustbin as a wicket. When he was about four I decided to introduce the concept of runs into the game for the first time. If he reached the tree with one of his shots he would score two runs, if he reached the fence he would score four runs and if he reached the fence without the ball hitting the ground he would score six runs.

Every time he played a scoring shot I would then ask him how many runs he now had, for example eight plus two. Obviously at the start he made quite a few mistakes when adding up the scores but he soon picked up how to add either two, four or six to any given number.

I then thought about which other sports that I could also use to help him with his maths. I am sure there are many sports out there which would have been suitable but the other two we used were snooker and rugby.

Snooker is actually the perfect sport to use as the different colours are worth different points and this gives many more options than just two, four and six. These are the values of the different balls in snooker, the red is worth one point, the yellow two, the green three, the brown four, the blue five, the pin six and the black seven.

I am sure that many other parents could use these same ideas to help their own children to develop their adding up skills in maths.