We also use songs to work on vocabulary, memory and repetition. This week, the children asked if they could sing the song “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes” over and over again.

It’s fun to watch children of different ages and abilities participate in this activity. The beauty of this song is that everybody loves it. Everyone feels successful and happy, regardless of their developmental level, their physical coordination or their ability to anticipate and execute the moves.

When children sing songs like “The Wheels on the Bus,” the music and movement stimulate so many areas of the brain that learning is enhanced by as much as 90 percent. Physical movement also enhances memory and recall.

When I see students singing and laughing their way through “Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes” or “Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear,” I know that they are developing physical skills such as balance, spatial awareness and hand-eye coordination, as well as social skills such as cooperation and taking turns.

Children also learn how to think, explore, work things through and develop their language and self-expression skills as they sing and dance or play an instrument.

Have you ever heard a child make up all of the words to a song as they sing it? That’s brain development in progress!

Using songs in your daily routines can help you meet the math standards for early childhood education. Keep it light, easy and age-appropriate! Sing loud, sing often and sing off-key! The children don’t care. That won’t be what they remember. They will remember the words to the song, which will lay a strong foundation for their future math learning.

We use songs to work on vocabulary, memory and repetition. This week, the children have begged to sing the song “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes” over and over again.

It’s fun to watch the different levels of coordination, anticipation and expectations as children of different ages and abilities participate in this activity. The beauty of this song is that everybody loves it. Everyone feels successful and happy, regardless of their developmental level.

When children sing songs like “The Wheels on the Bus,” the music and movement stimulate so many areas of the brain that learning is enhanced by as much as 90 percent! Physical actions and exercise also enhance memory and recall.

When I see students singing and laughing their way through “Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes” or “Teddy Bear, Teddy Bear,” I know that they are developing physical skills like balance, spatial awareness and hand-eye coordination.

Social skills like cooperation and taking turns, as well as the shared experience of learning how to dance and play with friends is simple and fun.

Children also learn how to think, explore, work things through and develop their language and self-expression skills as they sing and dance or play an instrument.

Have you ever heard a child make up all of the words to a song as they sing it? That’s brain development in progress!

Using songs in your daily routines can help you meet the math standards for early childhood education. Keep it light, easy and age-appropriate! Sing loud, sing often and sing off-key!

The children don’t care. That won’t be what they remember. They will remember the words to the song, which will lay a strong foundation for their future math learning.

“Can we go to the park today?” asks three-year-old Benjamin.

We are actually in the park when this comment is made. We spend many of our days at the park. It takes me a second to understand that he is asking if we can leave the “forest” section of the park and head to the playground.  As often as we head to the park, we very rarely make it to the actual playgrounds. We tend to be the “forest gang,” but today we follow his lead.

“Yes, let’s head to the playground!” I reply. Six little friends scream with delight and dash up the 60-foot hill to the slides and swings.

When we arrive at the playground, we discover a newly fallen tree with bark and branches scattered everywhere. I hear Ave call to her friends, “Who wants to make a creation?” But her friends are more interested in the playground equipment. I see the look in Ave’s eye. The tree is her playground today—her own personal treasure box. Her brain is on fire, and her creative juices are flowing. Ave quickly falls into a play buzz all her own. She starts collecting sticks, acorns, walnuts, rocks and large pieces of bark. She makes small piles and then settles in to start her “creation.” The blank sidewalk canvas is calling to this child. She begins to design, create and investigate, oblivious to her noisy friends on the playground.

Whenever I see a play buzz like this one blossoming, I offer my services.

“What do you need, Ave?” I ask.

“Bark, sticks, acorns, rocks…treasures!” she responds. “I need more treasures!”

Her “treasures” turn out to be discarded water bottle caps. Ha! I am sure that my brain is working as hard as Ava’s as I try to decipher her request. She never looks up and never stops to show me what she means. She is that deep into her play buzz. She has tuned out the world around her—and she is engaged in deep learning. This is the educational foundation that we strive for.

“Do you want STEAM? [Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math learning] I’ll show you STEAM,” I think to myself as this child creates her own curriculum. This is not teacher-directed learning. She owns this.

This nine-foot-long “creation” took our four-year-old friend 40 minutes of intense focus, determination and math and science investigation as she tried different pieces in different places before determining exactly where each piece belonged. She worked with an intensity that would make any early childhood educator dance with joy!

There are math and science benchmarks galore in this nine-foot work of art! Deep, brain-enriching, neuron-firing play. We have art, we have math, we have science and we have beauty. We have it all in this masterpiece from the hands of a four-year-old who used to worry me because I feared that she wouldn’t be able to sit for long periods of time once kindergarten began. Ave is a mover, a creator, an explorer, an investigator. She has been a hands-on learner from her earliest days.

Can Ave recognize her numbers from 1-20? She can’t. Can she count to 100? I don’t honestly know. I haven’t worked on these things with her. She hasn’t shown an interest in these benchmarks yet.

Do I struggle with that? Yes, I do. I am well aware of what that first week of “testing” in kindergarten will say about her “readiness.” Then I remind myself that Ave’s brain may not yet be ready for number recognition and counting, but her brain is ready for this! This estimation, this dimension-building and this logical, mathematical-thinking MAGIC that is happening before my eyes.

These interactions based on experience are truly the best way to lay the foundation for early math and science learning. These are the puzzle pieces that inspire children to keep learning. Ave has created shapes, worked with non-standard units of measurement, created sets and hit spatial reasoning out of the ballpark.

Math and science benchmarks are everywhere in this nine-foot work of ephemeral art! What exactly is ephemeral art? It’s art that is temporary and never expected to last. This masterpiece, in a city park where vandalism (sadly) is rampant, will be destroyed in a matter of hours. I feel a slight twinge in my heart.

I get down on one knee and say, as kindly as I can, “Ave, I am going to take pictures of your creation because I am worried that the wind or the raccoons or someone walking at night might accidentally break it. It is so beautiful, and I am sorry that it might get broken, but I promise to share a photo of your masterpiece with your family ….”

But, before I can finish my sentence, Ave stands up and says, “Oh, I know. Can we go back now? I am starving!”

This is a child who understands nature and ephemeral art. She engages in scientific exploration and mathematical investigation. The benchmarks for number recognition, when that part of her brain is ready, will come quickly and without effort. There is no doubt that her benchmarks in other areas of math are beyond her years. You can’t teach children what their brains aren’t developmentally ready to learn. Discover each child’s passion and learning style, and the benchmarks will take care of themselves.

Time has flown since Ave made her ephemeral art in the park—and she has just turned seven. As I write this, we are in the final days of the 2020 school year—a school year that has been disrupted by a global pandemic that has brought online learning into Ave’s life. It is not going well. Ave’s mother just texted me to say that online learning is not her daughter’s forte, nor is it hers. This is not how Ave learns, and it is straining their relationship and causing stress in the family. Ave is in tears, her mom is in tears and now her former preschool teacher is in tears.

Maybe it’s time for all of us to pause during this pandemic to take a good, hard look at what education could look like in America—without screens, without testing, without walls. It could be the treasure box that we give to this next generation of young minds. Another silver lining of the pandemic.

Oh, and Ave’s art creation in the park? It was left untouched for more than two weeks. I guess the raccoons and the would-be vandals appreciated it, too. So share the love and share the foundation of education through play! Trust me, it’s STEAM learning at its finest!  Stay safe, my friends. 

I am so honored and excited to be the Math at Home blogger for the next year! I love math, and I love watching math happen with children every day. My goal for the next year is to avoid how high and fast our children can rote count. I want to build the deepest, strongest foundation for learning and let the children build their own house of math on that foundation. I hope to give you a collection of pictures from my own program, quick-reading ideas, some great books to find at the library to build on the literacy skills and math understanding and a question to get some dialogue going about math and kids and life. We want to immerse them in math environments without worksheets or set times for math. It will come naturally, through play. I promise to keep it fun and easy.

Let’s start with a quick look at the brain. We know that the right brain develops first. It is really busy building our children’s imagination, creativity and intuition for the first three to four years of life. The left brain starts to kick in developmentally at about the age of seven. It gives us logic, language, literacy, numeracy. The right brain is full of sensory, play, relaxing. I like to think of it as RIGHT BRAIN=RECESS. That left brain over there…whoa, that looks like school/office to me. My own students are in the right-brain zone, age-wise. They are playing with rocks and friends, being creative and using their imaginations while learning how the world works. I really like recess, just like I did when I was five. So let’s stay out here in recess land for as long as we can! It will build the foundation for that school/office side of learning. I promise that play really will get us ready for the left-brain part of life. So, let’s get started!

Collections

Do you have a collector in your midst? That small child who can turn a five-minute walk into a 15-minute treasure-discovering adventure? You know, that child who slows us all down to look at the world below our feet or above our heads?  I love these kids. They make me crazy, wrack my nerves and raise my blood pressure, but they also make me slow down, take a breath, smile and find beauty in the oddest of places. And they make me smile really, really big, when I remind myself that this is the gold treasure chest of math’s foundation.

At the Ginkgo Tree, we are full of collectors!  We collect lots of nature’s loose parts like acorns and buckeyes, feathers and rocks. But we also collect colored gems, bottle caps, keys and other oddities. THIS, my friends, is the rock solid, hands-on, building the foundation of great solid math brain that we look for in early childhood play.

If it attracts their attention, and they touch it, they own it. They own their learning at this moment! Grab a bag, basket or bucket and take a walk and see what speaks to your children. A good pocket is priceless. Keep your phone in your own pocket and give your child the gift of time. What treasures do they find? What captures their attention? Do you need to mentor collecting? Keep your eyes out for heart rocks. We love a good heart rock, and it’s a great pastime when waiting at restaurants or appointments. Hidden in those landscape rocks, there is sure to be a heart rock!

When you return home, dump those treasures out. Before we can begin to count our collections, we need to figure out which are acorns and which are bottle caps. This will come very naturally as a child sorts the acorns into one pile, the bottle caps into another. We can sort into groups, we can arrange by size, color, shape, texture or weight! Remember, back in kindergarten and first grade, these were referred to as sets. Before you could count sets, you needed to separate into sets. If your child hit the jackpot on a particular item, you may wish to give it a special home. Perhaps a small box, a canvas bag, a Ziploc bag or an egg carton. These treasure are chock full of math potential.

Regardless of how high a preschooler can rote count, a child’s sense of what those numbers actually mean develops gradually. We call this “understanding number sense,” and it requires relating numbers to real quantities.

Young children have an inborn sense of more and less. What is fair or equal? Who has more ice cream, acorns or toy cars? They know! Children learn math sense by working with small sets of collections. Math sense refers to relating numbers to real quantities. Slow it down and let’s work on small groups. One to three objects for the wee ones, five objects for our preschoolers. If the grouping of sets leads to counting, try moving each object and giving it a number. Number sense is the ability to understand that the quantity of the set is the last number name given in that set. By making counting hands-on fun, children are learning place value and addition. Take it slow and keep it fun. Children will be exposed to the idea that the same collection can be sorted in different ways. Sets can be flexible. (Ugh oh, I saw your math brain go to sixth-grade math, where sets started getting a bit confusing. Pop out of that left brain! Get back here in recess!) Math is being taught a whole new way. They are removing that obstacle, your left brain might not have learned this new way, so relax and just sort the rocks!  Remember, not all skills come in a certain order. They will come at different times for different children and in different learning styles. It will come. Baby steps. Strong foundation. Let’s stay out for recess and enjoy the ride.

So, that’s it. Collect some treasures and we will meet later in the month and start putting those collections into play. In the meantime, head to your local library, neighborhood bookstore or Amazon and cozy up with your child for some great books on collections!  Amazon is easy, fast and convenient, but we want to keep our book resources alive in our neighborhoods!

[amazon_links]

Left-Brain Adult Lounge

I would be absolutely terrified if I knew how many hours my brain has tried to come to terms with my students playing with…bottle caps. Beer caps, specifically. Craft brewers are knocking out some crazy creative bottle caps! They are fabulous for sorting! I DESPISE branding and have removed most of it from our program, so am I branding alcohol preferences to my three-year-olds? Is this early math politically correct?  Am I totally overthinking this? I asked the parents of the students for guidance. They looked completely baffled and said, “I know you have thought this out, and you must have good reason for it!” If they only knew. So, I observed the kids as they separated the caps by features (dogs, colors, whatever popped out at them.) They can’t read. The letters are foreign to them because, remember, that’s left brain and their brain development isn’t there yet! I grew up next to a state park, and I collected bottle caps as a kid. They clinked like coins, they were easy to find, carry in a pocket and sort into categories.

I flip, I flop, I struggle. Somehow, bottle caps always win. And here’s why:

Numbers and Letters!

Sequencing!

I kid you not!  How funny is this?

Same but different!

HELP! What are your thoughts on this topic?  Am I overthinking all of this? Do I justify all the goodness of a bottle cap?  Apologies in advance, if this sends havoc to your brain space on the ethics of early childhood education! Have a great week!