Mathematical moments...
As an educator who has spent the past several years focused on mathematics, I would be remiss not to highlight the importance of exposing our young (and old) children to mathematical thinking. Math education has changed so much from when I was in school and the new work is both fascinating and easy for parents to imitate. We, as a country, have spent so much more time developing literacy skills that early numeracy is often ignored. Think about this, do you try to teach your kids the alphabet, read to them, sing songs, etc. etc.? How about these things: look for patterns, group items, compare how much more one thing is than another, etc. etc.? Hopefully you are doing all of these things. Even with my background I realized that I was doing way more of the literacy activities. So I decided to put together a few things you can do to help your children develop number sense and flexibility with numbers. And the great thing is, they're all fun too - see math can be fun ;)
NCTM, one of the premier mathematics organizations, put together the following list of skills for Pre-school - Kindergarten children.
"During this stage, children should begin to:
- count aloud
- compute the number of objects in a group
- understand that a particular number of objects has a fixed value despite the size or nature of those objects
- understand relative size and be able to sort objects by size and shape
- follow a sequence of two- and three-step commands
- be able to perform simple addition and subtraction computations"
One of my favorite things are Ten Frames. The picture above shows some simple one that I made, but here are two links to lots and lots of things you can do with Ten Frames.
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