I’m not a teacher, So how can I effectively help my child learn preliteracy and pre-math skills at home?
The material on this site is already familiar to you, so there’s no new learning for you! The hardest thing for the ‘parent as teacher’ is usually finding the time in a busy world to sit down and work together. Setting aside 15-20 minutes to work together a couple of times a week usually works fine.
Parents can utilize fun activities and materials to make teaching fun and easy at home.
Parents are a child’s best teacher because of the innate bond they share and the parent’s deep concern for their future. Parental praise and one on one time are the strong motivators for young children. If you show an interest in their learning this material, they want to please you.
If your child doesn’t like a particular activity or is bored, try another. Let your child’s interest guide the process as much as possible. Working together should be a rewarding experience…. Not ‘work’. It also helps to have stickers on hand that can be ‘worn’ or placed in a special book at the end of each session. Also revisit old activities occasionally to reinforce skills they have learned previously.
Other than time (and perhaps stickers!), patience is probably the other most important element. It’s helpful to remember that children really aren’t ‘miniature adults’, no matter how verbal or smart they can be. And they will work hard for your praise if the task is within their capacity to accomplish.
Number recognition and counting are two foundational elements for acquiring basic math skills. As adults we tend to see them as the same thing. But for young children they differ in important ways because recognizing a symbol like the number 3 is not the same as understanding the concept of what the symbol stands for.
Counting and number recognition are foundational skills for math competence.
Doing is learning for most young children and an easy way to teach number recognition is with dot-to-dot tracing. Examples that you can print out for the numbers 1 to 20 are in this pdf file. (I attached the file in this e-mail). We can also teach child to say the numbers from one to ten much in the same way we can teach them the ABC song that requires them to sing the letters of the alphabet in sequence. This is really just memorization (which is a good skill in itself). But learning the sound of the letter ‘c’ in a word is a step further and provides a link to learn that the word ‘cat’ starts with ‘c’. In the same way, a child might learn to say the numbers in sequence from 1 to 10, but it doesn’t guarantee they have moved to the next step of being able to count up to 10 items.
Teaching children to count is the pre-math skill that gets the least attention in preschool curriculums. Learning to count before entering kindergarten is one of the most essential skills that predict a child’s ability to learn and enjoy mathematics later in school. This is why Federal guidelines suggest that children transitioning to kindergarten from pre-school should be able to count to 20. So learning it at home can improve kindergarten readiness. After children recognize the numbers, an effective way of teaching counting at home is to pair the number with counting. This helps them to understand the concept of what each number stands for…. that the number 2 actually means two objects, not just the number that comes after 1 and before 3.
Children have a natural sense of quantity, such as ‘more’ or ‘less’, ‘greater or ‘smaller’, and even awareness of the first few numbers (one, two, and three) though they may not know the names. This sense of quantity is an extension of our ability to perceive differences in the relative size of two groups, such as bunches of grapes.
Learning to count however is more complicated because it involves three distinct skills: 1) learning to see objects within a group as individual items, 2) re-organizing these items into a relational hierarchy (1,2,3….), and 3) having a symbolic system to represent numbers.
These skills can be combined in a task integrates them for 3-4 year olds, but it requires you to help. Below is an example of this integrative approach to teach counting. It uses five circles that vary in size and color and you ask your child to touch the circles following the questions listed. If they get it wrong, or find it confusing, you can do it first and them have them copy you. The picture that the child sees is on the right. The circles the child should touch following each question are shown on the left. The questions to be asked are on the bottom for you to read. As you can see, the task relies on color recognition and size recognition for sorting, as well as the ability to ignore size and color when asked how many total items are in the picture.
The example uses only 5 items in order to accommodate the limited short-term memory of children at this age. And asking them to touch the circles instead of pointing meets satisfies the best practice that says, ‘children learn best by doing’ (so do adults!).
At the next level, there other ways of teaching children to count easily up to a 100 and beyond that involve grouping items into fixed quantities like 5 or 10. We will show oyu some of those techniques in another lesson.
