How to Get Better at Mental Math: Tips and Exercises for Kids
reviewed by Jo-ann Caballes
Updated on February 17, 2026
Imagine your child counting totals faster than a cash register. Mental math practice is the secret to this math superpower! In this guide, we’ll look at effective strategies and tips that will help your child calculate numbers faster and more easily.
Key points
- Mental math is an important math skill that lets your kid calculate operations in their mind on the spot
- Tricks like visual aids, the right digital tools, and race-against-the-clock games can greatly help kids get better at mental math
- Platforms like Brighterly can connect you with tutors, who will help your child understand and practice mental math and help them develop the thought process that is most effective for them
What is mental math for kids?
Mental mathematics is the ability to perform arithmetic calculations entirely in the mind, without using a pen or a calculator. For this, children need to visualize the numbers and use strategies to find the correct values. These are critical skills for later life, both in and outside of the classroom.
How to improve mental math?
To improve mental math, the key is understanding number relationships instead of memorizing them. Kids need to play around with numbers, practice daily, and explore tricks, games, and mental strategies to see which calculation techniques work for them.
Note: Before we move on to the tips, I highly recommend taking a look at the What is mental math and why is it important for children? article to understand why investing time and effort into the topic is worth it.
Top 10 mental math tricks that work
- Practice mental math with a tutor
- Use flashcards
- Beat the timer
- Think aloud
- Use visual aids
- Make use of calculation tricks
- Subtract from 1000
- Estimate first
- Group mentally
- Make use of digital tools
Practice mental math with math tutors
Best for: Kids who learn better through an interactive, individual approach.
One of the best ways to get better at mental math is through practice with professional math tutors. Mental math is a skill to develop, and it can only benefit from the right guidance.
The tutor can be like a coach who observes the bottlenecks in your child’s mental processing of numbers. They do not provide the correct answer or simply teach multiplication or addition; rather, they help your child build a mental path to the right answer themselves and develop numerical intuition.
Mental math with Brighterly
If you are looking for online one-on-one tutors to give your kids some mental arithmetic practice, the Brighterly math and reading platform is a great place to start.
On the platform, you will be matched with experienced math tutors who will help your child transition from manual calculations to rapid practice of mental math. They will teach your children to develop the cognitive stamina needed to hold multiple steps of a problem in their heads, visualize numbers, and perform operations like subtraction and division correctly.
The classes are interactive, fun, and engaging, and each lesson is tailored to your kid’s specific learning preferences.
In addition to one-on-one classes, Brighterly offers free resources for your home practice. They include mental math practice problems and math worksheets.
Use flashcards
Best for: Children who need to build quick recall and recognition.
Flashcards are often seen as boring drills, but when learning how to do mental math quickly, they can be a great tool. If you use them correctly, they can greatly help your kid to develop the ability to answer a math fact without even thinking.
When it comes to flashcards, the trick is to shift the focus from studying to playing — you can turn flashcards into a high-speed game. For example, you both flip a card, and the first one to shout the sum or product wins. Games like this will turn the chore of learning how to do mental math into a personal quest that is challenging, engaging, and fun.
Another game is to create a “speed pile”, where you have several stacks of flashcards, and your kid is trying to beat their own record for clearing the deck. Make sure to mix cards by difficulty and include exercises that require different operations, so they stay attentive and alert as they solve these mental math problems.
Beat the timer
Best for: Kids who like challenges and a gamified approach to learning.
Another way you can help your child solve mental math exercises is by using a timer. More specifically, they need to work under time constraints. This is also important, since both in math class and in daily life, kids often find themselves in situations where they need to make quick calculations.
When your child has a set time limit, they are forced to abandon the slow methods of counting, like counting on their fingers, and rely on mental math tips and shortcuts to get the right answer.
There are many types of beat-the-clock strategies you can use, and you can also come up with the ones you like! One method I have found effective goes like this:
- Start with a sprint of ten relatively simple problems to give your kid a sense of the challenges ahead.
- Track their first attempt with a stopwatch.
- Then, repeat the round at the same level of difficulty, but aim for getting the right answers just five or ten seconds faster.
- Then repeat again, reducing the time further.
- As they try to beat their own record and get a better time, your child will start prioritizing efficiency and looking for quicker ways to solve the problem.
Think aloud
Best for: Students who better learn and remember through listening and speaking (auditory learners).
Next up on my list of effective tips on how to improve mental math skills is verbalizing the process. This is a critical step, especially if your kid is just starting to learn mental math.
By thinking aloud, your child needs to organize their thoughts and explain the logic they are using to solve the problem. Among other things, this helps them to spot what strategies they use in their solutions. As your kid walks you through their thought process, you can also see where their logic failed and where the mistake was. So, it also acts as a double-check system.
How to implement? Start simply by asking your child to explain how they solve a math problem as if they were a math teacher explaining it to the classroom. Give them a small problem that varies by level and ask them to tell you how they would solve it.
Use visual help
Best for: Kids who are visual learners and better remember the material when they see it.
Mental math for kids can be a bit too abstract at first. To avoid overwhelming your little one, I recommend using visual aids. With them, you can help your child visualize how numbers move and change, and build a mental map before they have to make calculations in their head.
The visual aids you can use as your child is learning how to do mental math are many, ranging from pictures and real-life objects to tools like number lines and base-ten blocks. You can even go a bit old-school and use an abacus!
These aids and tools will give a physical shape to what your kid needs to do in their mind. As they become more comfortable with making mental calculations, you can gradually reduce the number of visual aids and tools you use. By this time, they should be able to visualize the numbers and operations without needing any external help.
Make use of calculation tricks
Best for: Kids who are starting to get better at mental math and need some calculation shortcuts.
Let’s now move to a more math-heavy tip on how to get good at mental math.
To make quick calculations in their minds in any setting, children need to start using shortcuts. Luckily, there are many time-tested shortcuts that can make mental math much quicker and easier.
These tools not only speed up the mental math practice process but also help your kid to improve their number sense, as they see the inner workings of numbers. Let’s look at some of them.
- First is the front-end addition, which, in simpler terms, means adding the large number first. At school, kids are taught to add from left to right. In mental math, it is often quicker to start by adding the large number. For example, for 64 + 25, they can think as 60 + 20 = 80 and 4 + 5 = 9, 80 + 9 = 89, which is the answer.
- Next up is doubling and halving, which is a really cool trick in multiplication. If your child needs to multiply two numbers and one of them seems hard, they can halve one number and double the other to see if the problem becomes easier to solve. For example, 16 x 5 can be intimidating, but if we halve 16 to get 8 and double 5 to get 10, 8 x 10 = 80. It’s suddenly much easier.
- The last trick I’ll discuss here is the compensation, or the rounding strategy. If the number your kid is dealing with is too close to a round ten (like 18 or 9), they can treat it as a round number and then adjust the difference. For example, in the case of 45 + 19, they can think 45 + 20 = 65 instead. In the next step, they just need to subtract it back: 65 – 1 = 64.
Subtract from 1000
Best for: Students who often get confused with borrowing and regrouping.
Subtracting a three-digit large number from 1000 is often a stumbling block for kids, as they often need to use borrowing and regrouping.
A classic mental mathematics calculation trick that can help with this is subtracting from a thousand. It’s a simple rule that also completely removes the need for borrowing.
To use this trick, your child simply needs to subtract the first and second digits of the number from nine, then the final digit from ten. For example, we have 1000 – 648. Here, your child would think that 9 – 6 = 3, 9 – 4 = 5, and 10 – 8 = 2. The answer is then 352.
It’s not only a super useful trick but also fun for kids to learn, as it often feels like a secret code.
Estimate first
Best for: Students who are still a bit slow in basic addition and subtraction.
Math is about the details, but it’s also useful to know how to find the ballpark answer first before diving into the nitty-gritty. This is what I call the estimation rule, when kids first get the approximate answer.
When your child is just learning how to practice mental math more accurately, the estimation-first approach can be a great guardrail, as it helps catch major errors first. As your child rounds a number to the nearest ten or hundred, they get an expected range for the answer. They can then narrow down from there. For example, in the case of 49 x 5, they may think “Well, it’s almost as much as 50 x 5, which is 250. So, my answer should be slightly less than 250”.
This also works the other way around. If the student’s estimation was 450 but the answer is closer to 250, it can be a good clue that they need to re-evaluate the steps they take when calculating.
Group mentally
Best for: Students who are still a bit slow in basic addition and subtraction.
The next trick on my list is for the cases when your child has a long string of numbers to add. A common approach here for kids (and many adults, too) is linear: they simply process the numbers in the order they appear. As the running total gets larger, the additions become more confusing.
When doing mental grouping, the process is different. Children need to look at the entire list of numbers first and try to find “friendly” pairs, like 2 and 8 or 3 and 7. These are then naturally much easier to add. Here, they restructure the problem to make the calculation easier, which naturally makes additions much faster and improves your child’s mental math skills as this becomes a habit.
Make use of digital tools
Best for: Children who learn better through various materials and media types.
The right digital tools can offer so many great ways to improve their math skills. The emphasis is on the word right. Given this, how to get better at mental math online is quite a common question, as there is so much material and so many tools that you can choose from.
My advice on how to make technology work for you would be to look for platforms and materials that encourage active, rather than passive, learning. For example, watching pre-recorded videos explaining mental math tricks is great, but it’s also important that your child gets to practice that. They can do this with worksheets, online math tests, or even interactive apps. The apps specifically are great, since they can keep scores for months, letting you keep track of your kid’s progress. They can also help turn a short car ride into a productive mental arithmetic practice session.
Note: Make sure that whatever resource you use adapts to your kids’ skill level. If it’s worksheets, gradually add to their complexity. Many online tests and math apps have the feature built in.
Conclusion
Mental math is fun, exciting, and incredibly practical. It’s far more than just getting the right answer quickly; it’s also about developing a number sense, understanding how numbers work, and coming up with strategies that work for each person. By mixing mental math tips and using digital tools, including online tutors to get the right personal support, you can help your child make mental math into a lifelong skill.
You can book free lesson on Brighterly and see for yourself how the lessons in mental math practice for kids work.
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