Project EQUALS provides workshops (not really helpful unless you live in the Bay Area) and curriculum materials for teachers, parents, family, and community members.

According to the website, the page for mathematics for young children and their families is called Family Math.

FAMILY MATH focuses entirely on families learning mathematics together. In FAMILY MATH, mathematics becomes a challenging and engaging learning experience for everyone. Its math topics connect to the school curriculum, including algebra, probability, statistics, estimation, logic, geometry, and measurement.

 

Check it out here.

I, personally, am much more concerned about educators who either don’t understand development or refuse to acknowledge development as a central force in the lives of young children than I am when I encounter parents who have little to no understandings of development.  I am forced to remind myself that most parents have never studied human development in any way, shape, or form.  Should we expect parents to have realistic expectations of development when professionals often do not?

There are several things to remember.  First, parents may have nothing to compare their child to.  It is possible that their interactions with their child are the only interactions they have ever had with a small child.  It is hard for us, who work and think about young children all of the time, to remember how limited some people’s experiences are.  Second, human development is not taught as a required course in high school or college, so for many people, the concepts have never even been introduced even in the smallest ways.  Third, parents only want the best for their children and sometimes this might mean that they believe that pushing them will result in better outcomes. If reading is the ultimate goal, then why not expect children to work and work and work at reading until it happens?

Rather than giving in to parental pressure, it our job, and yes, our responsibility to educate parents about development.  Hot button topics like reading may be easier to explain with a less loaded topic like bike riding.  We don’t expect children to ride 2-wheeler bicycles when they are 2 or 3, right?  Everyone is perfectly happy to let their toddler or preschooler ride tricycles and Big Wheels for a good, long while before the training wheels are taken off.  Everyone would agree that it would be crazy to put a 2 year old on a 2-wheeler bike.  Why would we expect anything different cognitively or socially?  Children get ready to be 3 by being 2.  And they get ready to be 5 by being 4.  No amount of expecting 5-year-old skills and behaviors from 3 year olds, will result in faster or better outcomes.  This is a great fallacy and one we must combat if we want what is best for the children we serve.

Do you have people in your life who are not blood but who are “family”?  For 20+ years we have been celebrating life events with Stephanie and her boys.  We have parented our  boys together through the good, the bad and the ugly.  We have traveled together.  We have watched the boys grow up together. We are “family” in the truest sense of the word.

Last year, we got Stephanie involved in the Early Math Counts project, as she is an early learning math specialist, trained at Bank Street, with a very progressive view of early mathematics education.  You don’t know you know her, but many, many of the lesson plans on our site were written by Stephanie.

So this week we have talked about math.  I wish you could all hear how passionate she is about math literacy for young children.  She has BIG ideas about how to improve early math curriculum and implement exciting strategies to engage children in math. She believes that we have to try several strategies, frequently, until we find one that works for each child.  She understands that children approach math concepts differently but can all learn if given the opportunity to explore the concepts in a variety of ways, over time.  Her classroom is full of math.

She loves to play math games with children and has multiple ways of engaging them through game play.  With older children, she uses riddles.  Have you ever heard this one?

Down in the Valley of the Green Glass Bottles

There are lollipops but not suckers.

There is cheese but no milk products.

There are mittens but no gloves.

 

Children (8+) can begin to ask questions as they try and figure out what the requirements are to be down in the Valley of the Green Glass Bottles.  She will allow her classroom to ask questions until they figure out what the patterns are.  What is required and what is forbidden?  Can you figure it out?  Don’t use Google.

They leave tomorrow.  We will miss our “family”.

As a teacher, I was always looking for new and meaningful ways to represent number in the classroom.  It is tricky, as the young child cares little for random facts and figures, and cares deeply for information that pertains directly to them.  Now, it may be a reach to believe that a 3-year-old will be interested in the birthdays of his/her family members but it could be an interesting investigation, nonetheless. Once you have collected everyone’s special day, you could chart the frequency of birthdays in each month. You could count the moms who have birthdays in the summer and dads who have birthdays in the winter.  The possibilities are endless.

Before embarking on this, be sure that there are no children in your program who do NOT recognize birthdays for cultural/religious reasons.  It is best to be mindful of these children and skip this altogether, so as not to leave anyone out.

Age is an interesting concept for children because it is not concrete, it can’t be seen, and there are few rules to determine it. Do you remember thinking that your teacher was really old, only to find out many years later that she had only been out of school a couple of years which made her about 24?

Children as young as 2 can tell you how old they are.  This is because it is constantly being reinforced at home.  But just because they can tell you that they are “3” or “4”, doesn’t mean that they have a real understanding of what that number means.  Exploring the ages of family members is a way of exploring number and introducing the concept of age.   You could use the photographs of the families to ask the children how old they think everyone is.  You can then chart their answers in order to have a discussion about age.

It will continue to be more interesting to the children to talk about their own ages, as they are the most interesting topic to themselves.  Be sure to include their ages in the charts.

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.