Last week I wrote about magnetic number sets and I described wall mirrors for the classroom. This picture shows how beautiful wall mirrors can be and how even the youngest children can benefit from looking at their own reflections. Using this space as a play area can also be an effective way to encourage children […]
You’ve never actually met anyone as sweet and warm as Annie. She was a young newly-married graduate student when I met her and she is now a mother of 2, an early childhood professional and still the sweetest lady you could ever imagine. You can read in her answers how thoughtful she is about early […]
This board game is one of my absolute favorites for the very youngest children. The company is European (Ravensburger) and specializes in developing beautifully made and appropriate games and materials for children. The Snail’s Pace game is not about winning and losing, there will be plenty of time for that in all children’s lives, it […]
The last few paragraphs of Chapter 2 “Objectives for Teaching Number” describe how children come to understand the representation of number concepts as well as the differentiation of symbols and signs. Kamii writes that once the child has the concept of the number seven, s/he can then learn that the number seven can be represented […]
The first set of refrigerator magnets we bought had 3 sets of the alphabet’s 26 upper case letters with several duplicates of commonly used letters (E, N, S, A, etc.). We kept these in a large bucket in the kitchen so the kids could play with them on the bottom half of the fridge. For […]
This week I thought I would let you all in on an exchange I had with another of the friends/colleagues/acquaintances I asked to complete the Parent Questionnaire. Although this person did not ask to remain anonymous, s/he didn’t really respond to the questionnaire, except to recount some of her displeasure with the school system in […]
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I love playing games. I really love playing board games. I grew up with Monopoly and Scrabble and, later on, Trivial Pursuit and Risk. I didn’t know until I was a teacher of young children that there are wonderful games designed specifically for very young children and most of them support mathematical concept building in […]
Last week I described the first half of Chapter 2 “Objectives for ‘teaching’ number” from Kamii’s book Teaching Number in Preschool and Kindergarten. If the main objective of education (according to Piaget) is autonomy then how does the objectives for teaching number fit? Kamii describes the difference between the “construction of number” and the “quantification […]
Camelia is a colleague of mine at the college and our offices have been on the same floor for years. She is a much-loved math professor (In case you didn’t know, this is a little unusual, as math professors often get a bad rap, simply because they teach difficult content and are blamed when it […]