Supporting your kids’ cognition – what they think and what they know – is vital to learning new knowledge and skills. Developing early math skills helps with logical and abstract thinking, and teaches kids how to analyze, understand, and organize the world around them.
Kids practice sequencing and patterns by:
- Matching, sorting, classifying, and ordering objects
- Recognizing, duplicating, and extending simple patterns
Kids build an understanding of numbers and their purpose by:
- Developing an awareness of quantity and number
- Knowing number names and counting sequences
- Recognizing the number of objects in a set
- Understanding numbers as quantities
- Writing numbers and associating written numbers with a quantity
- Understanding addition as “adding to” and subtraction as “taking away from”
Kids practice measurement and comparison by:
- Measuring objects using standard and non-standard measurement
- Using differences in attributes to make comparisons
- Identifying currency and recognizing that it holds value
Kids develop spatial sense (and an understanding of geometry) by:
- Exploring the positions of objects and their movement in space
- Identifying, describing, comparing, and creating 2D and 3D shapes
You can help your kids practice and develop their early math skills by finding meaningful ways to incorporate these concepts into their everyday play. Count stairs when you go up and down; pretend your home is a store and pay for things you want to buy using real change; sort and match pompoms, stuffies, and other toys in different ways; measure how tall things are compared to a tower of blocks, then measure the same things with a ruler; practice addition and subtraction concepts at snack time.
Adapted from the Early Learning Standards
You can download this printable HERE.
