Parents often bring their young children into our professional care because they want better for their child in future. They hope for their child to become more social, better educated, or more prepared for formal schooling. We often see this discussed in terms of which skills we hope children will gain from having been in early education. Most recently, we see reporting on the 21st Century Skills that children will need in upcoming decades to be successful as adults or in the workplace. While I don’t love the idea of thinking of young children in terms of their future employment, I do believe that parents’ desires to know that their children are being supported to develop and grow while in our care is quite valid. No matter which list you look at or what outcomes for children you are hoping to promote, you will almost always see two things: creativity and social skills. I believe that taking creative activities outside and integrating them into playful group interactions is one way to meet those needs. For this last blog in the series, I would like to share some of my favorite ideas for outdoor creative activities.

In my opinion, the three best things about taking creative activities outside are that they can become: Big, Nature Based, and Messy. I’ll share my favorite ideas in these categories.

Big

When you’re outdoors you have so much more space to do big, group projects. One of the simplest things to do is to take your blocks and things that go outside and add some chalk. Children now have the freedom to not only build, but to design a city, a farm, a magical universe around what they are building. All the better if you can leave the chalk and come back to it the next day and let their design grow and grow. Creativity does not always mean working with traditional visual arts like paint; the deep creativity and design thinking that it takes a group of children to plan and build a city is intense and meaningful. This planning and design requires many overlapping early math skills and uses them functionally: spatial relationships, measurements, counting, and much more.

Another outdoor activity that I love, that requires some planning and construction, but can be done fairly cheaply is to make a large, group plexiglass canvas.

Children now must navigate not only the creative experience of imagining something on their own and then expressing it through paint, but they must also interact socially to paint in tandem with other children. Their experience of their creation is quite different as the painting now has two sides and interacts dynamically with changes in light and weather. They can really play with angles, position, and size in way that is not possible on their own piece of paper.

Nature Based

One of my favorite math and creative activities is weaving. It includes fractions, cardinality, spatial relationships and lots more math. It is often a skill that many children come to us already interested in as they have experience with braiding and twisting their hair. It is also quite empowering for children to make a piece of clothing or a toy with their own hands. When I take weaving outside, I like to incorporate natural materials into the weave, using large sticks as the loom. There is something satisfying and soothing about seeing the natural materials as part of the weave. Weaving is also a big and tiring project, so you can lessen the burden by weaving as a group. Children learn to help each other, take turns, and allow others to make choices in these shared weaving activities.

I also love gardening as a math and nature based activity. In many urban communities, schools can get a discount on a shared plot. You can also create rich gardening experiences with buckets, planters, and in reclaimed recycled materials such as barrels, crates, and bathtubs. Children must count and measure where to put the seeds. They must understand the passage of time as they wait for the plants to grow. They build social, caretaking skills as they water, feed, move, and fret over the plants. Caring for plants a group makes you part of a community in which everyone can have a roll, data takers, waters, soil tillers. Even better if they plant things that they can eat to increase their sensory connection to nature.

Messy

My favorite category. I love to do dynamic and mechanical painting. Painting with toy cars and trucks, making machines that paint, creating a painting pendulum, and even painting with squirt guns. So many children are not successful with or do not enjoy creative activities because they feel pressure for their final product to “look right.” Big body movements and wild, messy painting with no end product in mind can be freeing for these children and act as a creative spark that supports them in further creative activities. It also supports the planning and proprioceptive skills they need to be ready for early math concepts and social interactions. Best thing about it? If it gets too messy, get out the hose and then it’s water play time.

My last activity is a favorite and it’s free. Mud! Let kids get messy head to toe. It’s a rich and necessary sensory experience. Children need time to feel different textures, have their shoes off, and not worry about what’s happening to their clothes and hair. We are finding more and more in research that important connections are built in children’s brains during these free, messy, and particularly barefooted activities. If you add dramatic play props; buckets, dolls, trucks/cars, blocks, etc. the children will naturally begin using the mud creatively and socially as part of their natural pretend play. Dumping mud from bucket to bucket also requires measuring and supports thinking that leads to conservation of mass and other important concepts.

I hope throughout this series that I given you some ideas or reminded you of some old favorite ways of using things that we know work for and are important for young children into your professional setting and information to defend the deep math learning that comes with those activities. Children can and will learn math through plan and outdoor experiences when they are given the space, time, and freedom.

“When I think of these experiences and interactions, I wonder why we, as teachers, feel the need to intervene and explain so often.” –Nora Thompson

I love this quote. In it Nora is talking about allowing children the time and space to include children with disabilities in to their classrooms and play spaces, but I think it also serves  as lens through which to examine many of our interactions with young children.

Take a moment and put yourself on a happy, Summer day outdoors in your childhood, sometime before you turned eight. Take a breath and remember the smells, feel the sun warm on your bare skin. Picture what you are doing, where you are, and how you feel. You could have grown up on a rural farm or in a city apartment, but you can likely imagine a day like this.

A question, did you think of an adult? What were they doing? I would imagine that if you saw an adult there, they were playing with you rather than directing your play. Now think about some of the unique math skills you might have learned at this time. What angle does a basketball bounce of the hoop, how high can you swing and where will you land when you jump, how long is an afternoon? You probably cannot remember the exact moment you learned one of these or many other skills, but what I can be almost sure of is that it was not because an adult was teaching it to your directly.

As early childhood professionals, we all know that children need lots of uninterrupted time to play to learn and grow, but sometimes when I am out with my students, watching them interact with young children, I wonder if we have forgotten what this looks like. It’s very simple and very, very hard. We just have to let them be. Really, really leave the children alone, and put yourself in a spot where you can see what’s going on and where the children know where to find you. I routinely tell my adult students that leaving them alone to learn is ABSOLUTELY the hardest part of my job. Because I care, because I find them interesting, because I want to learn too, and because I feel that I should be “busy.” I promise that your children will learn math playing outside, cardinality, subitizing, basic operations, it’s out there. I also know that children must have the time to be in control and to be free.

Here are some things not to do when your children are outdoors for free play.

Ask Questions: I promise, you already do this enough. The next time you are trying to get something done, imagine someone next to you asking questions you both already know the answer to: what is it, what color, what’s it name, what’s it doing? It’s exhausting, stop.

Play with them: I LOVE to play with children, but there is a time and a place for it. You are big, you are powerful, and you have authority. When you enter children’s games you interrupt their ability both to build meaningful social interactions with each other, and to learn to solve conflicts independently. Use grown-up play sparingly.

Make Suggestions: You could put this over here, you could build this like this, try standing here. There’s no right way to play, so why should the teacher’s opinion trump that of the children’s? Give suggestions only when children are legitimately stuck and better yet when they have independently asked for help.

Entertain Them: If the kids are bored and whining to go inside or for you to be the “monster” in a chase game for the millionth time, ignore them. Boredom is a necessary state of being to build reflective thought, creativity, ingenuity, and motivation. Let it happen.

So what can you do? Here are some suggestions with what to do with your time when children are free playing outdoors.

Observe & Document: Really watch them. What can you learn about the children’s development, strengths, needs from how they move, play, and interact? Take pictures and notes on their learning. Write plans for how to expand on ideas they are independently exploring. You can turn a day of whole digging into an curriculum about holes. Where do they come from, who digs them, what’s in them?

Check in with your fellow teachers: This is a great time to have a chat about how you are doing and feeling and what needs to happen next.

Rest: Yes, you have to supervise the children, but other than their actual safety, let your brain and body be quiet for a moment. Feel the sun and wind, breathe.

Take a project outside: Need to get the knots out of the yarn or the rinse a million paint brushes? Bring them outside with you and get it done while the children are playing.

A Math Problem: If you find yourself with a real need to do busy work during outdoor free play try this: calculate how many minutes the children spend each day being told what to do and they amount of time they get to truly choose what they want to do. What’s the ratio?

But what about my director, families, co-teacher who doesn’t believe in free play? Here’s some easy to digest research to back you up.

34 Reasons Why Play Matters

Peter Gray TedTalk: Decline in Play

Anji Play: Self Determined Play as a Fundamental Right

            When thinking about using a scientific inquiry approach with young children, I often refer back to one of the guiding principles of the Reggio Emilia Approach: “Research represents one of the essential dimensions of life of children and adults, a knowledge building tension that must be recognized and valued.” I love this principle because it reminds me to focus on the fact that children and adults learn about their world in much the same way, and that tension and conflict is part of the learning process.

It might be easy to imagine how to take the idea of research and scientific inquiry outside, in a rural or suburban setting. You could research the amount and types of fish in a local pond, identify the source of the different insect sounds you hear on a hot summer day, or try to find out why the flowers in a field are different colors. As an early childhood teacher educator at City Colleges of Chicago, most of my ECE teachers are teaching in highly urban settings with limited access to outdoor space. I want to share some ideas for taking scientific inquiry outside in these urban spaces.

In my Science and Math for Young Children course, I have my students invent the definition of science. They typically start by naming concepts related to science; animals, experiments, chemistry. As we continue to discuss, they usually independently come up with some kind of statement about questions and answers. The definition from Merriam-Webster is: “knowledge or a system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws especially as obtained and tested through scientific method.” To me this is what makes scientific inquiry such a beautiful match for early childhood; we don’t have to teach or control much, children naturally do it. They are born hardwired to build knowledge, through testing the world, to find general truths and laws about how things work.

When we start to operationalize what scientific inquiry might look like in an urban educational setting with a group of small children, I sometimes see things fall apart. Here are some of the missed opportunities I often see when teachers try to do science with young children.

Science Fairs and Wacky Experiments: I love science fairs and experiments, but sometimes I see teachers do a “Big Day for Science” in which they invite parents or experts to do big, wacky experiments (I’m looking at you baking soda volcano). These are fun and fine as long as they don’t take the place of everyday inquiry and investigations.

Adult-Led Investigations: No more bean sprouts in a Ziploc bag. Unless a group of children comes to you legitimately interested in how bean sprouts grow and what their roots look like, don’t do it. In order to keep children motivated, and to support them to really use the process of inquiry, it must be the children who choose the question and plan how to find the answer themselves. You are but a guide and resource along the way.

Nothing but Biology: Many children love plants and animals, but not all do. There are many amazingly interesting scientific disciplines: astronomy, physics, chemistry, microbiology, neuroscience. Let the children explore the full range of what it means to be a scientist.

So how do we take it outside when we don’t have big, open, natural spaces? First and foremost, children need exposure to the outdoors, whatever that means for your location. Walks around the block or on bike paths, trips to nearby garden centers, playing at a city park or local school basketball court.

Once we get kids outdoors, we have to really, really listen for the questions they have about the world around them, and then help them dig in. How does a fire engine make noise? How does our local baker make the muffins rise? Where does the steam coming out of the manholes come from? How does the spinner at the playground spin? Why does a basketball bounce? Why do worms come out when it rains? It is important to know too, that you do not need to be an expert in all areas of science. You need to be the primary investigator, who can evaluate and reform the question to make it more meaningful, find and vett resources and references, create an experiment, take data, and reflect and iterate.

            I think that you will find that if you begin following your children’s lead and investigate through their interests that doing science becomes not only easier, but leads to deeper and more meaningful learning.

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When I teach Truman College’s Science and Math for Young Children course, I have the students break into groups, do research about, and then debate the benefits and risks of children’s interactions with nature and technology. Typically both the students on the nature side and on the tech side begin the debate arguing that theirs is the more important subject to teach young children. Through the process of research and debate, we almost always come to the conclusion that young children need both. I want to share some of my ideas about ways to meaningfully integrate the use of technology into outdoor and nature experiences for young children.

It is also my experience that many parents and early childhood professionals are often afraid of using technology with young children. We are in the midst of a wave of media accusations that technology both delays children’s development; is as addictive as heroin and a panic that our children are not graduating from high school with technological skills that they need for future success. My approach is to think critically about why and with whom the technology is being used and what it might be replacing. Is it being used to support the child or distract them, is it being used to support a relationship, and is it taking the place of something they need for development? I also like to remind people that any object made by humans to make their lives easier is a technology. I love the anecdote that Socrates was against writing because he believed it would prevent people from learning by memorization. See the Erikson TEC Center for reports on the use of media and technology with young children along with other excellent resources.

I love bringing technology and nature together because that is often how technology is used in the real world by engineers, scientists, naturalists, and other professionals. It also allows adults to relax a little about the technology as it is not being used passively or preventing kids from going outside. One of my favorite ideas is to disable the internet and apps on an old, donated phone so that children may use it only for photos and videos. Empower children to document what is interesting to them when they are in nature and to share it with their friends and families. They can make a photo journal or video essay of their experiences outside.

There are also amazing apps that allow you to use the camera on your phone to identify and classify plants and animals. Your phone or tablet becomes a real world research tool that children can use instantly. This is especially enjoyable for children who have a special interest in a particular type of plant, animal, or insect. You can also use technology outside to have your classroom engage in citizen science projects. You can count birds, monitor the stars, and show your children natural images from climates that are both similar to and different than their own. Monkey Bar Collective modifies the idea of GeoCaching to keep children engaged in scavenger hunt activities in zoos, museums, outdoors, and other locations. You can use voice recorder apps to record animal noises, children’s musings, and other outdoor sounds.

It’s also important to remember all of the “low tech” options you have for interacting in nature. Try keeping writing materials outside so that children can keep a nature journal or press their favorite flowers and leaves. Take maps and compasses with you on walks and use them to find your location and get to your destination. Bring clay outside and try to recreate a play structure or sculpt and animal that you see.

I often hear that parents and professionals are worried that if technology is around, children will not interact with each other or play. I believe this is a very valid concern. I think it is important that devices are available only when they are enhancing an experience, and that they are always to be shared, so that using the technology requires a social interaction. I also believe it is important not to use technology as a reward or a punishment, giving it more emotional value than it deserves. The other gentle reminder that I have for adults is to model the behavior that you would like children to use. If you do not want children to use a phone or tablet on the playground as a distraction, than you also may not use them in that way.

Technology can be a powerful tool for increasing interactions with and appreciation of nature when used socially, purposefully, and with moderation.

What’s your favorite childhood math memory? It might sound like an odd question, but you can probably think of your favorite book or your favorite school experience. Math should be just a fun and joyful as the telling of a good story or a scientific inquiry activity. I often find that my Early Childhood education students struggle with supporting children to enjoy math because they have limited experiences of enjoying it themselves.

What Makes Learning Experiences Joyful?

            Returning to the National Association for the Education of Young Children’s Position Statement on Developmentally Appropriate Practice, we can remind ourselves that children (and I would argue, people) learn best when:

Their learning is tied to personally meaningful experiences:

Child Development Creative Activities Students recreate a Starbucks; a very meaningful experience for them.

            This always makes me think of a student of mine that excelled in my Science & Math for Young children course. During a group reflection, she shared that as a child she had worked selling groceries with her parents in a market in Mexico. Her job was to be in charge of the abacus and to make sure that customers receive the correct change. Since then she has thought of herself as a math person. This experience was so powerful because she used math in a meaningful way that made her feel important, competent, and tied to her family.

We can create such experiences for young children in our care. We can give children duties that include math such as counting the materials for snack, reporting how many fruits they bought at the grocery story with their family, or measuring the space to install a new toy into the classroom. An important aspect of this is that we must make families feel included in their child’s math education. Family newsletters, activity nights, and take home activities should include information about math concepts being covered and fun ways to integrate them at home.

Much of their learning is wrapped within the context of play:

Myself and a student who was anxious about teaching math enjoying breaking open an old phone to see what is inside.

It may seem intuitive to add a sign-up sheet to a preferred activity into the classroom to incorporate meaningful writing into play activities. Early childhood environment should include just as many ways to incorporate math skills into play. Graph paper can be added to the block area to support awareness of measurement and geometry. Imagine the children building a city on a grid with measured street systems! One of my favorite ideas comes from one of my student and that is to add tracing paper to diverse areas around the classroom so that children may trace the items they find interesting and then compare them.

Children’s learning experiences are social:

Child Development Health, Safety, and Nutrition students connect with each other through planning, making, and enjoying a meal together.

There are two components to the importance of social learning. One is the adult expert whose job it is to scaffold learning. Children look to you as the sources of information and also as the lens through which to focus the emotional component of their emotions. When doing math related activities, you must also be having fun! The children will feel your anxiety, disinterest, and fear, but they will also feel your passion, joy, and confidence. This is especially true if you are match for your children in gender, sex, race, or ethnicity; as children may see you as an example of what they are capable of. If you are struggling to enjoy math with the children in your care, I encourage you to find professional development that supports you, meet with a teacher who loves math, find a math book you love, or explore the math in an activity you excel in maybe art or science.

The second component of social learning is that children learn many of their skills through positive interactions with peers. Children are serious engineers, mathematicians, and scientists. Give them real, math related puzzles to solve collaboratively. This box is too heavy to lift, how will we get it to the other side of our classroom? We need a new rug, how will we know how big it should be? We are having a party, how will we know how many invitations to make? This also comes from integrating real math tools into existing play areas. Include graph paper, measurement tools, light tables, tracing paper, an abacus, a cash register into your play areas and watch children make up their own math during dramatic play.

Final Thoughts

I will leave you with the same conclusion that I use with my students. Early childhood professionals are often children and families first window into the outside world. They are also their first experience with education and educational facilities. The most important task that we have is to make those first experiences manageable, safe, and enjoyable. The memory of early learning experiences will color the way that children and families think of themselves as learners and the way that they perceive school. There is no greater gift that we can give them than confidence and hope.

I think one of the most exciting and hopeful things about working in early childhood is knowing that both young learners and early childhood professionals are some of the most diverse populations in our country. You can literally see the beginnings of a more equitable and integrated future in the making.

While it is an area of great strength in our field, it can also be overwhelming. How will I instruct a classroom with children that speak five different languages? How can I communicate my goals for their child to a family who is just integrating into U.S. culture, let alone our classroom culture? How can I get a child to show me what they know if I can’t understand them or they can’t understand me?

Any challenge with young children requires us to go back to a professional foundation of starting with relationships and identifying strengths. The greatest strength that families bring to us is their investment in the well being and successes of their children. The greatest strength that children bring us is their innate desire to learn and make meaning from the world around them.

I think that early math brings unique opportunities to engage families and children’s interests and skills even when we are not a linguistic or cultural match for them. Families can sort, count, and find patterns within the context of their daily lives. Cultural differences in these activities can become exciting ways for families to be involved in the classroom and to share their knowledge and culture. There is so much math in activities that are also deeply rooted in culture such as cooking, song, daily routines, clothing and more.

One of my favorite examples of this is the tessellation or repeating patterns of the same shape. Made popular in modern culture by M.C. Escher, they also exist in Medieval Islamic tile work and showcase the rich math history of countries such as Turkey, Istanbul, and Iran. Children love tessellations because they are interesting, intuitive, and you can build with them.

Islamic Penrose Tiles in a Tessellated Pattern: www.sciencenews.org

Children can examine tessellations and look for them in the world. They can draw them on their own or make them from pattern blocks on a light table.

A light table can help emphasize the sides of shapes, the way shapes come together, and the space in between.

You can also use the strength of children’s curiosity about the world around them and math concepts to build community and a shared language in your classroom. Much of early math revolves around the importance of constancy and patterns. When you provide a consistent routine for your the children in your care, you are not only building their mathematical skills but also providing exactly the stability that supports children to make sense of the new language and culture of your classroom. Sorting activities can also be very organizing and relaxing for children who are overwhelmed or experiencing something new.

Professional Development students at Harry S Truman College discuss different ways to sort bottle caps. -Photo Credit: Gordon Schrenk

Shared construction projects can be a way to support children to interact and communicate with each other even when they cannot communicate readily through words. Foundational geometric skills are inherent in construction activities: identifying shapes and which ones work well together, angles and distance, measuring and more. It can also be a way to observe how children understand the world around them and to get a picture of a child’s cognitive, social, and physical skills. Open ended construction projects with unique and found materials are challenging for young children and allow them to develop skills around their own interests.

Harry S. Truman Child Development students built a marble run that plays a drum.

I think the most important idea to take away is to not underestimate any child’s capabilities or potential; especially not children whose culture or language differ from your own. Like their curiosity, the diversity that young children and their families bring to us is a special gift. Early Childhood Professional have the opportunity and the charge to nurture that gift and to support children and families to develop a lifelong love for learning through supportive relationships and creative instructional methods.

At Harry S Truman College, where I serve as coordinator and adjunct faculty in the Child Development Department, we recently had the opportunity to create Early Childhood Education lab spaces. The most unique of our labs is the ECE Tinkering Lab. T lab serves as part woodshop, part methods lab, and part technology lab and is used to support early childhood educators to deepen and fine tune their practice.

Some of the tools available to students in the tinkering lab.

Much like a good early childhood environment, the lab is not focused on getting anything in particular done. It is set up to be safe, inviting, playful, and to support early childhood professionals to have meaningful experiences during which they learn by doing. You can try, fail, and try again and then reflect upon your process. A lot of our courses use the tinkering lab, but it is very often used by our Science and Math for Young Children and our professional development workshops. In retrospect, it seems so obvious that if hands on learning works for children than it must also work for adults, but even as someone who helped planned the Tinkering Lab and many of it’s activities, I am constantly surprised by the magical, early childhood style learning that takes place in it. My students literally create and learn  things that I could not have imagined when I was planning my lessons.

It reminds me of the way in which young children construct knowledge. You cannot tell a child the laws of gravity, but you can watch them as they drop an object over and over again working like a scientist; making hypothesis, testing them, taking data, and coming to conclusions. This is also the case for math. Children learn math by interacting with it in meaningful, playful, everyday experiences; not through abstract lessons and memorization.

It can be hard to think about how a three year old might experience math as an everyday part of their play. I like to think of math as a language with which we make sense of our world and communicate ideas to others. Tinkering, or just messing about with things to see how they work, is an engaging way to integrate playful math into the classroom. It also relates to some of my favorite concepts of Mitch Resnick’s (Author of Lifelong Kindergarten) : low floors/high ceilings and hard fun. Tinkering is a low floor/high ceiling activity because while there is no limit to how simple the activity can be made, there is also no limit to how complex it can be either. Tinkering also embodies “hard fun” the idea that we learn best, work hardest, and enjoy ourselves most when we are being challenged doing something we are truly passionate about.

A professional development participant struggles with what to do next on her project.

Think about a class that wonders what is inside their broken toy? Why doesn’t it work? Can we fix it? If you let them take the toy apart they learn about geometry and shape, they will likely organically begin to sort and classify the pieces, they will learn about number as they find there are multiples  of the same piece inside, and they will learn about size as they try to find the right screwdriver for each screw. Even better if you and the children don’t know what will be inside. This is where that  learning magic happens; you couldn’t have anticipated the result.

After predicting what might be inside, students take apart a broken laptop.

Another of my favorite tinkering activities that brings hands on experiences to math is a build your own marble run. A cheap and easy way to do this is to get pegboard from a local hardware store and then cut wood cooking skewers down into small pieces. You can give the children recycled materials, pvc pipe, paper, and other found materials to build the marble run and let them balance it on the dowels, tape it, or clip it together with clothespins.

Alumni, faculty, and their children worked together to build this marble run.

This particular activity is one of my favorites because the math: angles, geometry, calculations of speed and distance, etc., is embedded in the fun, children get very excited by watching the marbles. It is also very frustrating. Letting children sit with this tolerable frustration of tinkering with something that doesn’t work exactly as they would like builds not only the content knowledge, but also the self regulation and motivation skills that young children need opportunities to practice. I like to give older children (and adults) a specific challenge.  I might ask them to make the marble go very, fast or make a noise. I also like to have the children work in pairs or small groups. There is nothing that builds friendships and relationship skills better than getting through a frustrating project together and being proud of the outcome.

To me this is the hardest part of the instruction, trusting yourself and that you have set the learners up with the confidence, prerequisite skills, materials and environment that they need and then really stepping back and letting them learn. Really let them get stuck and figure something out on their own. This is why I often plan learning activities to which I don’t know the correct answer, because then I can’t spoil the learning for anyone else by just telling them what to do. The other difficult thing about this type of teaching is that it requires a lot of planning. You have to know your learners, know yourself, and constantly be on the lookout for that just right experience that is going to give a child the opportunity to craft knowledge for themselves at the exact moment when they need it.

That’s just what I would hope for early learners future success with math as well. That the skill that they needed to solve a problem would be there for them in the exact moment that they really need it.

It’s probably not a great start for my first Early Math Counts Blog entry to tell you all that used to dislike math. Like, really dislike it. I can still feel tears of frustration welling up while my face got hot when I couldn’t finish all the questions on a math test before the class period ended. I can see the the words in my math textbooks getting fuzzy in front of me as I tried to make sense of them, even though I was a gifted reader.

You can imagine that as a Child Development Professor at Truman College, I agreed to teach our Math and Science for Young Children course with a bit of reluctance. But this is a success story, this is a story about why that course is now one of my favorite courses to teach. Throughout the next four weeks, I’ll be telling you about what I believe is the power of teaching math to young children and the special charge we have as early childhood educators and care providers.

Leslie Layman instructing professional development students about the relationship between tinkering and math skills.

You have within your hands the power to prevent children in your care from experiencing those hot tears of frustration and self doubt. Like most stories in early childhood, this one starts with relationships and self reflection. You have to know your children well enough to identify their strengths and weakness and support them with rich opportunities that support both. You also have to respect young children enough to want to empower them with knowledge and experiences, even if you never had them yourself.

Truman College students built different the sized beds from the fairy tale, “Goldilocks and the Three Bears.”

For me, the ability to understand, teach, and even take joy in math started with a critical look at myself and what I was bringing to the table. I could not lay all of the blame on my math struggles on my teachers. When I looked closely I saw that I had expected math to come easily to me because reading had. When it did not, I became frustrated and at times gave up rather than embracing an interesting challenge. I also saw that part of the reason that I didn’t enjoy math as I did other subjects was because I was searching desperately for a why. When I looked again as an adult, the why was there all along. Math explains millions of whys in the world around us: why do certain instruments make certain noises, why do certain blocks make stronger structures than others? Math is a shared language to describe the wonders of why and how the world fits together the way that it does.

Professional development students doing a loose parts activity that focuses on sets and sorting.

Once I had taken this critical self-reflection journey I could see what my purpose was as a Child Development Professor teaching Math for Young Children to early childhood professionals. That’s when I began to love teaching math. Like, really love it. I realized as math-phobic educator, I had a special gift. A gift of compassion and understanding for people for whom math does not come easily and a gift of awe and respect for those for which it does. I could use that gift to find the magic and the why in math instruction and pass that on to others. So this is a success story, and a call to action for all my math-phobic educators out there. You have the power to interrupt the cycle of math phobia. You are specially equipped to support young children who doubt themselves and struggle. We know from research that one of the most important indicators of children’s success in math  is the attitude of their teacher toward math (Ernest, 1989). Someone very important to me says if something scares you, run towards it. This is your charge.

References

Ernest, P. (1989). The knowledge, beliefs and attitudes of the mathematics teacher: A model. Journal of education for teaching, 15(1), 13-33