Developing Math Skills
Helping Your Child Develop Good Foundational Number Skills At Home
Jan 19, 2008
Numbers are everywhere: in our bones, our organs, in leaves, flowers, segments to an orange, spots on a beetle, limbs to a spider – and yet for many of our children numbers seem far off mysterious things to be feared and avoided. This is unnecessary!
Developing a Relationship with Number
Children need to develop relationship with number sense, a number awareness, visual math and the written numbers. This is where much work can be done at home.
Number Sense
The most important thing to develop is number sense: a complete familiarity and comfort with numbers and quantities. This is also one of the most simple things to do at home.
In developing this sense we build a solidness and surety into all later understanding of math and also for the children a greater ease with themselves and their surroundings, for example they will learn that they always have ten fingers, no matter how many times they count them!
Observation as a Learning Tool
Begin with asking simple questions, for example, ‘how many fingers do you have?’. When the child can answer without hesitation (or counting), move to another question, again keep it simple in the beginning. The aim here is not to test the children but to build awareness: it should be fun! Another simple question may be, ‘how many people are in this room?’, or ‘how many people are in our family?’.
Make it a Game
Questions become more game like: how many shoes by the door? How many windows in this room / the house? How many people at the bus stop this morning? How many toothbrushes in the bathroom? How many letters in your name? They can involve memory: ‘how many petals on the red flower’, ‘how many eggs did we buy at the store?’ and so on.
Daily Practice
What we are trying to do is enable and encourage the child to see numbers in her environment. To know that 6 is bigger than 4 is not instinctive, it must be learned and by counting alone, children only hear progression not size, or volume, or quantity. So the more this is put into daily lives the better. It is also good practice for adults too – this game helps focus, attention and awareness. It sounds so simple but it is so important that a concrete sense of what number is, what quantity is, is developed in children.
The Beauty of Numbers
Numbers can be something to comfort us - it is a given that we have 10 fingers and 10 toes, that 15 alsways follows 14, in the math of kindergarten and elementary school there is always a right answer. Children love the right answer. Every right answer supports their self-esteem and confidence. Continue developing their number skills with visual math games.
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