Math at Home

There are so many ways that math can be included in day to day life. Teachable moments are all around us. Counting fingers and toes is a simple way to get to twenty. Add more people and the numbers increase. It's easy to go from there to counting by fives or tens. Find parts of the body that come in pairs. Math is all around us! What math activities do you do with your children?

MATH AT HOME

We hear a lot these days about preparing children for literacy before they go to school.

Parents understand the importance of reading to their children from an early age, getting them excited about the world of books.

You can hardly find a preschool aged child who can't say the alphabet, recognize some key letters ("That says Stop!"), or attempt to print their names.

Equally important to academic success, however, is laying the foundations for understanding math, but this is an area often overlooked.

Now, lest you be tempted to dash out and get some flashcards or purchase a cute math computer game, let me suggest that your daily life with kids offers more than enough math experiences to get them well started.

Indeed, higher math concepts are embedded in simple interactions. Real life experiences make math concepts come alive in ways that flash cards never could.

Even youngest toddlers are casually exposed to the idea of number when you give them two crackers--one for each hand, something every toddler loves—-and count them as you do.

Even sharing becomes easier when you give the child a number of objects and ask her to give half of them to her brother.

Older preschoolers learn to count the number of forks and napkins needed when they set the table; an added bonus is discovering the concept of one-to-one correspondence when they learn to match place settings to chairs.

Counting objects helps children get through errands in the car-—"Let's see how many stoplights on the way to the doctor's office" or "Why don't you count the red cars we pass, and I'll count the blue ones."

Using math talk as part of regular conversation helps children understand concepts of comparison. "Do you need more Cheerios? Here I'll make two piles. Which one is bigger, and which is smaller? Can you make the piles the same?" And so on.

The family height records—-ours are on the sun porch doorway—-help children absorb ideas about size, measurement, and comparison, leading to addition and subtraction as we try to interpret how much each child grew this year.

Calendars are perfect props for math ideas. First, they have lots of numbers, so kids can get familiar with the sequence and appearance of numbers.

Then, they have the capacity to introduce simple subtraction. "How many days left until we go to Grandma's? Yesterday it was six. Let's count and see how many today."

When my children were small, we used to decorate our table with paper chains, with one link to count each day until an anticipated event, like a birthday. We made a ceremony of removing a link each day, and math was being absorbed as well.

Cooking is a complex activity, involving both literacy and math skills. Measuring ingredients helps practice counting again, as well as introduces new math terms, such a half a cup, and one-quarter teaspoon.

Before the cooking begins, trips to the grocery store allow more rehearsal of math skills: "Please choose four oranges for us, and then we will have to get one gallon of milk. The gallon is the biggest container. Which container looks like the biggest one?" Estimating is another important foundational skill.

One last household activity that forms a basis for later math understanding is sorting things—-socks as we fold laundry, similar toys to put away, like shapes to fit inside each other in the pot cupboard, and so on.

You may benefit by wonderfully tidy desk drawers when you ask your youngster to separate all the paper clips, rubber bands, pencils, and markers into separate containers. Classification is a basic math understanding.

Math at home gives your child important foundational knowledge, while involving him/her in your daily routines.

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