Talking With Their Hands: How Gesture Helps Children Solve Maths Problems

Your child stares at a maths question, fidgets, and says they 'can't think'. It looks like distraction or giving up, and it is easy to get frustrated. But cognitive science suggests those restless hands may be exactly what your child needs to find the answer.

This is the third article in our body-mind series (begin with how movement shapes your child's mind). Here we look at gesture - one of the most overlooked tools for helping children with NAPLAN numeracy and reasoning.

Why hands help the brain think

In How the Body Knows Its Mind, Sian Beilock describes a striking body of research: when children gesture while solving a problem, they actually lighten the mental load on their working memory, freeing up capacity to reason. Gesturing also helps ideas stick, and can stop a child from freezing or losing their train of thought when they explain an answer.

In other words, "talking with your hands" is not a distraction from thinking - it is thinking, made visible. For a subject like NAPLAN numeracy, where children must hold several steps in mind at once, that extra mental room can make the difference between getting stuck and pushing through.

How to use gesture in everyday practice

Ask your child to explain - and let them move

When your child finishes a maths question, ask them to explain how they got there, and let their hands do what they want. Pointing at numbers, "drawing" a fraction in the air, or stepping through a sequence physically all deepen understanding.

Make abstract ideas physical

Use fingers for place value, draw number lines they can point along, or act out word problems with objects on the table. The more a concept can be touched and moved, the more securely it lands.

Gesture to beat the blank

If your child freezes on a question, encourage them to talk it through out loud while gesturing. Often the movement restarts the thinking that anxiety had stalled - a small, practical version of the calm-under-pressure skills we cover across this series.

Turning understanding into test-ready skill

Gesture builds genuine understanding; regular, active practice turns that understanding into NAPLAN-ready fluency. Working through real, exam-style questions - then explaining the tricky ones aloud - is far more powerful than silent re-reading, a point we make in the most powerful study tool your child isn't using. Our NAPLAN practice sets for Year 3 and Year 5 give your child plenty of numeracy questions to think - and gesture - their way through.

So if your child's hands move while they work, take it as a good sign: their body is helping their brain. Next in the series, we pull the threads together with a simple, physical routine for staying calm on test day.