Early start: Teaching Mathematics to Children

CEBU, Philippines - Do you speak math with your kids? Many of us feel completely comfortable talking about letters, words and sentences with our children-reading to them at night, helping them decode their own books, noting messages on street signs and billboards. But speaking to them about numbers? Not so much. And yet studies show that "number talk" at home is a key predictor of young children's achievement in math once they get to school.

Throughout the early years of life, children notice and explore mathematical dimensions of their world. They compare quantities, find patterns, navigate in space, and tackle with real problems such as balancing a tall block building or sharing biscuits fairly with a playmate.

Early development of number concepts is critical in developing positive attitudes about mathematics at an early age. As early as two years of age, many children would parrot the words 'one', 'two', 'three', 'four', 'five' etcetera. However, rarely do they understand that the number refers to an item or a set of items.

Engaging children with a variety of measurement concepts is a great beginning. For instance, children enjoy telling us that they are 'bigger' than their sister or brother or 'taller' than their playmate or that they are 'smaller' than the table. Young children will also think that they have 'more' in their cup simply because their cup is taller. At this age, they do not have any other strategies to guide them in determining which has more or less, which is heavier or lighter, and a lot more.

Mathematics needs to be promoted and children need parental guidance to help them with the misconceptions and to provide them with great learning experiences.

There are several ways of promoting and teaching mathematics to your child. As adults, we tend to over-think how to go about teaching math to children, but promoting mathematical thinking and basic math concepts can come through all kinds of simple hands-on activities. Here are some of the most common kinds of math activities you can do even at home.

Cooking

Cooking presents a wide range of opportunities to promote mathematical thinking, including measuring, weighing, counting, and estimating. Cooking also provides ample opportunity to use mathematical terms through casual conversation, like "we are going to put two eggs or the recipe tells that we need to measure out one cup of milk".

Cooking is an inviting, fun, hands-on approach to building math skills. The greater role children can take in the cooking process, the more they will be able to put into practice basic mathematical thinking and skills.

Patterning

Patterns are all around us and it doesn't take long for young children to begin to recognize patterns in their everyday world. We can use ropes or blocks or crayons for your child to outline something.

We can also introduce action patterns by doing actions such as clapping a rhythm or lining up in a pattern like stand-sit or identifying boy to girl.

Exploring Shapes

Building the ability to recognize and form geometrical shapes and designs is another part of everyday math experiences.

Tell your children the names of the shapes - squares, triangles, circles, and rectangle and let them touch and play with them. As children play with the materials, they are able to explore how shapes fit together to create buildings, cars, houses, and other items that have meaning to them.

(Sources: www.wikihow.com, www.blogs.kqed.org, www.teachpreschool.org)

The FREEMAN with the Ramon Aboitiz Foundation Inc. (RAFI), is running weekly features on Early Childhood Care and Development (ECCD) to emphasize the importance of ECCD and to increase public support for ECCD. For comments or suggestions, email [email protected].