Exploring the Family
November’s Focus on Families is going to take a look at studying the family unit as a means of mathematical exploration. All children have some definition of family, even though those definitions can be as different from each other as there are children in your care.
If you haven’t already done so, try to get each child to bring in a picture of their immediate family all together. This is good practice, as young children should be able to look at pictures of their loved ones throughout the day. Put these pictures up on the wall, at eye level to the children, so they can move over to them at will, and know that it is OK to think about and talk about their families.
The easiest math experience to start with is to help children identify the members of their families and then count them. You can help them with one-to-one correspondence by pointing to each family member in the picture and count, 1-2-3-4. Have the children do that as well. As a follow-up, you can chart the numbers of family members of a large sheet of paper so the children can see how many people make up each of their classmates’ families.
