Create a grocery list with needed items. Look through your Sunday paper coupons with your fifth-grader to see if they apply to any items on your list. Gather the coupons that apply and let your fifth grader add up the total savings for the coupons. Give your student an incentive by offering a percentage of the total savings in cash if their calculations are correct. Let the student calculate the percentage. You can also help your child learn how to balance a checkbook, maintain a budget, or do other simple household chores to reinforce basic multiplication and division.
Fractions can be practiced with a number of things. Help your student bake a cake or pie and work together to cut fraction pieces out of the whole. Get a deck of cards and choose two random cards. Place the larger card on the bottom and the smaller on top. Flip through the deck to find equivalent fractions. Play wastebasket ball by shooting a paper ball into a wastebasket. Let each student take ten turns and calculate in fraction form how many of the attempted baskets made it. Take these figures from these games and practice turning them into decimal form.
Teach your student the different types of angles: acute, obtuse and right. Allow your student to hunt around the room for different types of angles and write them down. Ask your student to hunt for shapes around the room as well and to record her findings. Give your student markers, pens, paper and a stapler, and let them create a geometry dictionary with the different types of angles, shapes and any associated formulas they are learning.
Help your student begin to learn exponents by shuffling a deck of cards, allowing the student to draw two cards and using the smaller number as the exponent to the larger number. Show the student how exponents work by multiplying the large number by itself according to the number of the exponent. For example, ten to the third power would be ten times ten times ten. Help your student work out the problem. Help your student learn equations by cutting strips of paper and writing variables plus a number, a plus sign with a number, a subtraction sign with a number or whatever algebraic function you choose. Let students arrange the strips into equations and solve them.