Math in Early Childhood? Math in the preschool and kindergarten classroom? You bet. And fun also.

Math as every older child knows can be boring. Especially since most kids end up watching a teacher solve problems on the board while they fidget in their seats.

Math for kids has become an activity that is done purely through worksheets, workbooks and board exercises.

Which is a real pity

Math which is part of life should be learned as part of life.

Piaget discovered a few key ideas about children that helps us devise math activities for young children. In this case children in the early childhood years.

Four things Piaget taught us

1. Children see the world differently than adults do
2. Children s mental development goes through stages in a fixed sequence
3. Different children move from one stage to another at different rates.
4. Children learn best through manipulation of concrete materials.

Maybe that’s why it wasn’t until I was taking my math for teachers course in graduate school and we were learning adding and subtracting fractions with pattern blocks that all of a sudden it clicked for me. (15 years too late)

So what this series is about in a nutshell is this:

I am going to be giving you a full math curriculum for Early Childhood Education in many forms.

You will be getting ideas, circle time activities, worksheets that tie directly into concrete activities, games and activities to do in a math center, all designed to make math fun and relevant to what they are learning.

If you have a center based classroom adding a math center is a great place to set up many of these activities for the children to explore during their work period.

The math center can simply be a table that is set up in a corner of the classroom where you will need storage space nearby to store all of the materials that you will make, collect or buy.

If you are doing this in  a homeschooling environment you will probably just need the storage space as you can convert any table to a math center.

Many of the activities that you will get to do with the children will be homemade by you and I will be showing you what to make.

There are however 3 different items that I feel are vital for many of the activities that we will do and you can decide if you want to purchase starter kits or full sets for your early childhood math curriculum.

These 3 items are

Cuisinaire rods

Interlocking Unit Cubes(unifix cubes)

Plastic Pattern Blocks (Set of 250)

As I will be giving you activities that will deal with these items you may want to have them on hand.

Topics I hope to cover in this series are:

• Sorting and classification
• Seriation
• Number
• Patterns
• Measurement(length and weight)
• Beginning addition and subtraction
• Graphing

I hope to give you lots of math activities that you can do in the block area as well.

As I said the activities will be varied and useful for different parts of your daily interaction with the children.

Before you add to the Math Center

There are a few things to be considered before adding an activity to your math center.

1. It’s a good idea to introduce the activity and procedures for the math center in your circle time with the children. Or just discuss with small groups of children.
2. You need to make sure that the children have some experience  with the skill you are going to introduce in the center so that they will be successful when doing these independent activities.
3. Try to plan activities which can be used over a long period of time and that can be done over and over again.
4. You cannot leave one activity for too long as the interest in the center will wane.
5. Games, puzzles and other mathematical activities can remain at the center on a shelf for reuse over and over again.
6. Allow the children free exploration of the materials before giving them the activity directly.

In my next post I will begin by giving you actual real ideas that you can start implementing instantly with your children.

You do not have to wait until I finish this whole series before you begin trying out the activities. They are fun and educational, independent of each other.