SHELTON – Mathematics is as important to early childhood education as literacy. As a parent and your child’s first teacher, now is the perfect time to explore mathematical concepts and curiosity at home.
Young children love mathematics. They want to know who has more, which is bigger, and how objects fit together. Use these interests to build mathematical knowledge and understanding at an early age, when the brain is developing most rapidly.
The Shelton School Readiness Council provides this column as a public service to parents of children birth to 9 years old. Try these ideas and fun activities to develop the concepts essential to learning mathematics, specifically: number and operations, patterns, geometry, and measurement. Watch as your child grows and matures and finds math concepts as easy as ABC!
• Help your child practice counting skills. Have him or her count objects regularly. How many computers are in the library? How many books are in his or her room?
• Give directions involving numbers. Examples: “Please put three plates on the table.” “Take four steps to get into bed.”
• Ask your child to count to 10 by finding numbers around the house. Examples: “1” on a clock, “2” on a remote control, “3” on a board game spinner and so on.
• Build your child’s geometry skills by having her label household items. He or she can draw and cut shapes out of construction paper, name them with markers, and tape the labels to the objects. Examples: “rectangle” for refrigerator door, “cylinder” for peanut butter jar.
• Help your child understand time. Ask how many times he or she can clap hands in a second or how many somersaults he or she can do in a minute. Then, time your child. He or she will get a better idea of how long a second or minute really lasts.
• Turn your child into a rock explorer. It’s easy! Rocks come in all shapes and sizes and kids can find them anywhere. Have your child fill a bag with rocks and count out how many they collected. Then line them up by size or sort them by colors and compare the groups – using more and less, larger and smaller.
• You can take this activity one step further and can have your child make a rock sorter. Help your child cut different size holes (small to large) in a shoe box lid. As he or she puts each rock through the hole that fits best, her or she will learn to sort by size.
• Be sure to talk up math. Let your child know that you think math is fun and that he or she will use it all lifelong. Then, make math a part of daily life. At the post office, have your child estimate how many people are in line. In the grocery store, ask how much milk will cost with a 50-cent-off coupon.
• Use math for fun too, playing games like Yahtzee, Connect Four, or Monopoly.
• Read books about math. In Jack the Builder by Stuart Murphy your child will learn addition seeing what Jack can build with just one more block. Other appropriate books to share are Equal Shmequal by Virginia Kroll to learn what equal means or Counting on Frank, Rod Clement’s tale of a boy who uses his dog Frank as a ruler.
For more information about the Shelton School Readiness Council, please call Elspeth Lydon, Chair of the Council, at 924-1580 or Cara Mocarski, Shelton School Readiness Coordinator, at 929-1430. Also visit the website www.sheltonpublicschools.org.
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