posted by Dr. Bilge Cerezci At all ages, children classify intuitively to make sense of their world that seems largely out of their control. By 2 weeks of age, infants distinguish between objects they suck and those they do not. By 2 years, toddlers form sets with objects that are similar. In preschool, children begin […]
posted by Dr. Bilge Cerezci As she sits on the floor, a three-year old starts stacking blocks with various shapes and sizes. After some experimentation, she realizes that it is hard to build a tower if a block lays on its curvy side. What does this 3-year-old discover about shapes? From an early age, […]
posted by Dr. Bilge Cerezci Young children are motivated to explore mathematical concepts they encounter in their everyday interactions with the world. Through these interactions, they develop a range of informal understanding of numbers including ideas of more or less and one-to-one correspondence. For example, a child as young as two knows if she gets […]
posted by Dr. Bilge Cerezci Traditionally, mathematics education has not been considered developmentally appropriate for young children (Battista, 1999). Math is abstract while young children are deemed to be concrete thinkers, and some cognitive developmental work done in the mid-twentieth century has been used to suggest that young children’s mathematical ideas develop on their own […]
posted by Dr. Jeanne White When older children and adults perform chores such as doing laundry or putting away dishes, they may not even realize they are making decisions about how to classify objects into categories—washing the white clothes together and putting the plates together on a shelf. Young children can begin to see how […]
posted by Dr. Jeanne White Young children naturally begin to create patterns with objects such as Unifix cubes or colored tiles, even if they do not realize what they’ve created is called a pattern. A child’s early knowledge of color or shape patterns can lead to later recognition of more complex patterns in large numbers […]
posted by Dr. Jeanne White As young children are formally introduced to the names of shapes, they begin to notice these shapes in their surroundings. They see their plate as a circle and their napkin as a square when they eat dinner. They look at the windows and doors in a room and recognize them […]
posted by Dr. Jeanne White Young children love it when an adult sits down and reads a book to them, carefully studying the illustrations before the adult can turn the page. Why not seize these opportunities as a way to introduce or reinforce mathematical concepts? There are four reasons why I like to use children’s […]
Math is a natural way of thinking and making sense of the world. Mathematical situations arise every day. You have to be ready to notice the math all around us and to engage children in doing and talking about math. Attribute is a mathematical idea that arises very early. Attributes are properties or qualities that […]
posted by Lisa Ginet It is hard to know what is going on in anyone’s brain. Even when asked to explain ourselves, we cannot always express our ideas clearly. Young children, who are still developing both their communication and reasoning abilities, have an especially hard time explain their own thinking in words or “showing their […]