How to keep your child practising maths during load shedding
Power cuts don't have to derail maths progress. Here's how to keep practice steady when the lights go out.
It's 6pm, homework time, and the power goes out. The laptop is at 12%, the Wi-Fi router is dead, and your child has a maths test on Friday. For many South African families, load shedding has turned a simple evening routine into a daily puzzle, and maths, the subject that rewards steady practice more than almost any other, often suffers first.
The good news is that a few small changes to how you plan practice can protect your child's progress, even when Eskom has other plans. Here is what works.
Why maths is hit hardest by interrupted routines
Maths is cumulative. Each skill depends on the one before it, so when a week of practice is lost, the gap rarely stays small. A child who misses several evenings of work on fractions in Grade 6 may arrive at ratio and percentages in Grade 7 with shaky foundations.
Short, regular practice is also far more effective than occasional long sessions. Fifteen to twenty minutes a day beats a two-hour cram on Sunday. Load shedding disrupts exactly that rhythm, which is why a deliberate plan matters more than ever.
Plan around the schedule, not against it
Most households can check the load shedding schedule on their municipal website or an app a week ahead. Use it to decide, in advance, which nights are for which type of practice.
- Power on: do screen-based practice, such as an online maths app, while you have electricity and a charged device. Charge laptops, tablets and power banks whenever the grid is up.
- Power off: switch to paper-based work, such as written revision, times tables, mental maths games or correcting mistakes from earlier practice.
- Pick a fixed daily window: if the slot is hit by an outage, shift it to the next available gap rather than skipping it altogether.
- Keep a printed backup: a few printed worksheets or a notebook of tricky questions means there is always something ready to hand.
Make the most of offline practice
A power cut is a good excuse to build skills that don't need a screen at all. Mental maths, number facts and times tables are perfect candidates, and they are the very skills many learners lack when they hit harder work in the senior grades.
Try quick-fire rounds by candlelight or torch: doubles and halves for younger children, multiples and square numbers for the middle grades, and fraction-to-percentage conversions for high school. Ask your child to explain a method aloud as if teaching you. If they can explain it clearly, they understand it.
Written error correction is another strong offline task. Have your child redo old test questions they got wrong and write one sentence on what went wrong. This is slow, focused work that pays off at exam time.
Load shedding doesn't have to mean lost learning. It just means practice needs a Plan B.
Use your power hours for targeted practice
When electricity and data are available, make those minutes count. Generic practice can waste precious time, so it is better to spend screen time on the topics your child actually finds hard.
This is where Equals2 helps. The app tracks your child's performance, identifies weak areas and serves targeted practice on exactly those topics, so even a short 15-minute session is productive. If the real problem turns out to be an earlier concept, students can go back one or more grades or terms and strengthen those foundations, with questions covering Grade 1 to Grade 12.
Protect your child's energy and attitude
Frequent outages are tiring for children too. Late dinners, disturbed sleep and dark evenings can drain motivation, and a frustrated child learns very little.
- Keep sessions short. Twenty focused minutes is better than an exhausted hour.
- Celebrate consistency. Praise the habit of showing up, not only the marks.
- Do the hard topics first. Start with the difficult material while your child is fresh.
- Talk to the teacher. If outages seriously affect homework, let the teacher know. Most are understanding.
The bottom line
Load shedding is frustrating, but it doesn't need to derail your child's maths. Plan around the schedule, keep offline practice ready, and use your power hours for targeted work on the topics that matter most. Consistency, not perfection, is what builds maths confidence over time.