September 26, 2024
We find that one sure fire way to warm up children’s attitude towards mathematics is to build math activities and lessons out of the books they all love to read. When we start to sort through books that could be used in this way, three categories emerge.
Measurement is a topic with a lot of early math big ideas and books are wonderful portals to explore them. Plus, children’s books provide an easy platform for repeated, playful conversation. When reading books about…
From a racial justice centered perspective, books can be powerful tools to engage children in mathematics learning. The worlds, stories, adventures, characters, and possibilities that are made available through books – explicitly math focused and…
In this video, preschoolers share the quantities they see when looking at a photo of a box of doughnuts. There are many ways to answer the question, how many of what?, depending on the unit.
Many of children’s favorite board games follow a path to a goal. Exploring a number path with young children also leads to a goal that is critical for early mathematics: understanding number relationships. What is…
Counting books that offer children opportunities to participate bring play into math learning. These books engage children physically, cognitively, and emotionally—making them favorites that children will ask to read again and again.
“More” is often one of children’s first words. Infants attend to differences, though they don’t yet discriminate between "more" as quantity or magnitude/size or intensity of sensation. Toddlers are beginning to differentiate between attributes and…
It turns out that mathematical thinking is developed in conversation with others; asking students “how do you know that?” will reveal a child’s mathematical reasoning skills. The ability to explain one’s thinking is a cognitive…
This child uses the visual arrangement of a ten frame to conceptually subitize quantities into the teen numbers. He recognizes a full row as a unit of 5 and uses that to derive larger numbers…
This child encounters a new type of problem situation: a part-part-whole story where both parts are unknown. He is uncertain how to model the problem at first but has some success with adult support. Focus…