A pair of four-year-olds in my classroom are happily playing “dice wars,” a simple but fast-paced game. To play, each child rolls a die and the player who rolls the highest number wins. No one is keeping score today—and nobody seems to care who wins each round. 

I watch as Juan shakes the die between his palms, rolls it, counts each pip (dot) on the side that’s facing up and announces, “1, 2, 3!” I rolled a three!”

“My turn!” exclaims Maria as she shakes the die between her hands and rolls it. “SIX! I win! Six is more than three!” Maria doesn’t need to count the pips. She recognizes the pattern immediately and her number sense tells her the value of the pips on the die.

Rolling a die is fun in its own right, but these friends are working on the math skill known as subitizing. When children begin to recognize the pattern on the die and associate it with the number of pips (dots) without counting each pip, that is subitizing!

Children develop subitizing skills in much the same way that they learn to read sight words.

In a previous Early Math Counts blog post, Jen Asimow, M.Ed, explained it this way: “Remember when you learned about ‘sight words’ and how children learn them? According to one school of thought, children memorize sight words by taking a mental snapshot of the entire word. By using context clues, they learn the word as a ‘whole’ rather than as a series of letters. Consider how children learn the words EXIT or STOP.  Both of these words appear in the same way—on signs above doors or on red octagonal street signs—and nearly always in the same colors and typefaces. All of these clues help children form a mental picture of these two words, and they often learn the pictures before they learn the individual letters that make up the words.”

Maria and Juan are playing with a die, so they are only working with numbers ranging from one to six. As they play successive rounds of the game, they are beginning to recognize the patterns on the die without counting the individual pips.

With every roll of the die, Juan’s pattern-recognition skills are growing stronger. Before long, he can recognize the total number of pips on each throw without counting.

According to child development experts, the ability to subitize quantities up to and including four by the age of five represents a significant developmental milestone. 

Subitizing is a fundamental math skill, and dice games are a good way to help foster the development of this skill.

“Hey! Do you want to play that block-building dice game?” asks Pierre as he grabs a die from the jar and joins the group. 

Roll and Build is another dice game that we’ve played in our classroom for years. One child rolls a die and the other children add that number of blocks to their towers. Children learn to recognize four dots on a die, which helps them understand the cardinal value (how many four represents), which they can then link to the symbol (4) and the word (four).

Games like this provide repeated opportunities to interpret the dot images. As children figure out how many pieces to collect or add or how many spaces to move on a game board, they develop their number sense and other early math skills such as counting, number identification, the correlation between numbers and the items being counted and concepts such as greater than or less than.

Keep a jar full of dice within easy reach to give the children plenty of opportunities to practice and make up their own games.

Begin by subitizing quantities of 1, 2 and 3. In a math workshop that I attended, the trainer had blacked out the pips representing 4, 5 and 6 for the younger children.

If a child is having difficulty subitizing, reduce the quantity of dots. 

Dice games help young children develop math and social-emotional skills in a fun and engaging way.  So grab some dice and introduce your gang to subitizing fun! 

Check out our Early Math Counts lessons page for dice game ideas. Be sure to click on the Connect With Families button in the left-hand column of each lesson to download a Parent Letter that you can customize to share the day’s learning activity with parents and other family members.

“One, two, three, flip!” 

“I win!” shouts Matif.

Remember playing War as a child? It’s simple and fun and it teaches young children how to win and lose without a lot of drama.

I love playing cards with young children because that little deck helps foster the development of early math and social-emotional skills in a big way.

When I play War with very young children, I often pull out the face cards and any card higher than a six. Depending on the ages and developmental levels of my students, I may even pull out the aces because it’s too difficult for young children to associate the letter “A” with the number “1.”

Start by dealing the cards evenly between all of the players, stacking the cards face down in front of each child. 

No peeking allowed!  On the count of three, each player will flip the top card over into the center of the table, face up.

“One, two, three, flip!”

A chorus of young voices chants in rhythm as our game continues.

“I have a five,” shouts Mable. “That’s bigger than your two, so I win!” 

Compare the cards played. The highest card wins the hand. The winner takes all of the cards played in the round and adds them to a new stack of “won” cards. 

One, two, three, flip!”

“Ah, you both have a six! War!”

When there’s a tie between the two highest players, you have a “duel.”

To play a duel, the two players each place three cards in the middle of the table, face down. Then they each lay down another card (the fifth card for this round). This card should be facing up. The highest card wins, and the winner takes all of the cards from this round and adds them to a new stack.

“One, two, three, flip!”

I watch as a four and a three get turned over by the players in the duel.

“Ah, you won all those cards!” says the child with the losing hand. “Lucky you!” 

When children are playing cards, this is a great time to observe their number sense. Can they identify the numbers by name? Can they determine which number is higher? Can they follow the rules?  When the cards match, can they count out the three additional cards that they will need for a duel?  

Play until your main stack is gone and then count up how many cards the players have in their stacks of “won” cards. The player with the most cards wins. Once the children have mastered the cards through the number six, I will add the sevens and eights back into the deck. Later, I will add in the nines and the tens.

Many children will be able to play a full game of War by the time they reach kindergarten—face cards included. Keeping it simple in the beginning is a great way to assess your students’ number recognition skills and value development.

As children play this deceptively simple game, they are developing their number-recognition skills and beginning to grasp concepts such as number value, greater than and less than.

They are also learning important life skills such as how to follow rules, take turns and take their turns quickly without making the other players wait too long. That’s a lot of learning for a game that fits in your pocket! 

We also want to teach children how to win and lose graciously. I love playing War because it’s a game of chance and everyone has an equal chance of winning. Because each round has a winner, we are practicing the win/lose concept over and over again in rapid succession. There isn’t time for the winners to jump up and do a victory dance or the losers to break down and get weepy. The same child will not win every round, which gives every child many opportunities to practice good sportsmanship.

There’s a reason that children have enjoyed playing War for generations. It’s fast and fun and a bit addictive. So grab a deck or two, play a few rounds with your early learners and call it your math curriculum for the week. You’ll be teaching invaluable life lessons along with those early math skills!

Sing and clap along to the tune of “Bingo.” 

There was a boy with dark brown eyes and Timmy was his name – O!

T – I – M – M – Y,

T – I – M – M – Y,

T – I – M – M – Y and Timmy was his name!

“Sing my name song next!” cries Evani.

“Please, can we sing my name song too?” implores another classmate of Timmy’s.

Do you play the Name Game? I simply take a familiar children’s tune, add a personal note if needed and spell out each child’s name to that tune.

I started playing this game more than 20 years ago because music plays a powerful role in brain development. One five-year study by a team of University of Southern California neuroscientists showed that music instruction accelerates brain development in young children—particularly in the parts of the brain responsible for processing sound, language development, speech perception and reading skills.

Children love the patterns and rhythms of songs. Setting words to music helps children learn them more quickly and retain them longer. Even a one-year-old will beam with pride the instant you start singing their tune. They may not be able to talk, but they know their name song!

Research also shows a connection between music and math in brain development. Musical patterns, rhythms and tempo make it easier for children to learn mathematical concepts such as sequencing, simple counting and patterns.

Emphasizing the steady beat of a song by clapping or moving to the music helps children master the concept of one-to-one correspondence (the understanding that each object in a group can be counted once and only once).

Music also helps build early literacy skills and promotes social-emotional development. The Name Game helps children learn through play as they explore the letters that make up each child’s name. When we start simply by inserting the letters of a child’s name into the Name Game, we give these letters personal meaning, which will incentivize the child to remember them.

As we play the Name Game, we are building a strong foundation for later literacy development activities such as letter recognition, letter names and letter sounds.

There is something magical about the Name Game and its capacity to keep children engaged for extended periods of time.

Musical rhythms sharpen developing attention skills. The fun of singing your own name song and the name songs of all of your friends can make learning joyful. The Name Game became a tradition at our center to keep the children entertained and happy while lunch was being prepared and served.

Here’s a “cheat sheet” to help you get started with the Name Game.

“The Wheels on the Bus” is a great song for three-letter names:

The letters in my name go J – O – E,  J – O – E,  J – O – E,

The letters in my name go J – O – E, 

That spells JOE!

Four-letter names work well with the “Happy Birthday” song: 

K – O – B – E, 

K – O – B – E,

My name is Kobe,

K – O – B – E.

“Bingo” is my go-to song for five-letter names.

Six-letter names work well with “Polly Wolly Doodle” or “Pat-a-Cake.”

Seven-letter names pair well with “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” “Itsy Bitsy Spider” and “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.”

Eight-letter names work great with the song, “Muffin Man”

Nine-letter names? Try “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes.”

You get the idea! Let’s give it a try. Pick a child in your class (maybe the one who rocks your boat just a little bit, because we all have one and it’s to our advantage to have this child on our team.)

If you get stumped, head to your CD collection for inspiration and grab Taj Mahal, Ella Jenkins, Raffi or whatever song is a classroom favorite. This is the perfect opportunity to add music from the cultures that are represented in your classroom. Reach out to parents to ask for a favorite childhood song that you can match up to their child’s name. They will love you for it, I promise!

You can also use chants. The children who first played the Name Game in my classroom are in their mid-twenties now, but they still remember the song or chant that they used for each classmate!

Here are some examples to get you started:

M – A – D – I – S – O – N…Madison, Madison is our friend.

C – O – N – N – O – R…Our friend Connor is a soccer star!

Chants are a great place to start because you only need to rhyme with the last letter of the child’s name. You can also sneak the letters into the middle of the sentence if they have a hard letter to rhyme with, like the dreaded letter X!  Some letters, like W, will trip you up because that letter has three syllables. Take it slow, you won’t come up with these in a single night. Find a friend who can rhyme on a dime (haha) or a friend with a musical background. Friends like these can be extremely helpful when you are struggling with a name that’s difficult to set to music.

Each child believes they own their song, which they do. I try not to use the “Bingo” tune for more than one child in my class at a time. This may seem like an overwhelming task if you have a large class, so keep it simple. Maybe start with the first kids to be dropped off or the last to get picked up. Make sure you write down the tune and the words as they come to you. You will need your own cheat sheet in the beginning for reference.  

When children are actively listening to music, multiple areas in their brains are lighting up. By adding clapping, marching or other movements, we develop other areas of the brain. The more senses we use, the more we learn!

Give it a try. I promise you, it works like magic! If you’d like to add to my cheat sheet, make a comment below and we will start our own list to share with one another. Good luck!

Interested in other activities that help build early math skills?

• You’ll find some great counting songs in the Music and Movement section of our Noodle Cadoodle Counting lesson plan.
• Check out the Music and Movement section of our Monkey Mania lesson plan to pair music with counting and help children understand the concept of subtraction.
• Finally, our What’s in a Name? lesson plan offers more activities to foster the development of early math skills as children count, compare, contrast and graph the number of letters in their names. 

Click on Connect with Families on the left side of each lesson page, download the parent letter included with each lesson, personalize it for your class and your math curriculum for the week is complete!

Our moment of silent concentration and focus is interrupted by Parker ecstatically showing off her geoboard.

“You made a house?” asks Linnea, looking a little wide-eyed and confused. “How did you do that?”

“I just added shapes and it worked!” Parker answers, equally amazed by her own creation.

“I want to try that!” shouts Rowen.

“Me too!” echoes a chorus of four-year-old voices. “Show us how you did that!”

Geometry has entered our world today—and what better way to learn about early math and science concepts than through play?

I have come to believe that geoboards are one of the ultimate learning tools for peer mentoring. I watch as the four-year-olds follow Parker’s example and create their own versions of her rubber-band house.

I am a huge fan of these little powerhouses known as geoboards. Hands-on activities with these simple learning tools get children’s brain synapses firing like crazy and stimulate the development of new neural connections.

The boards, with their colorful rubber bands and infinite possibilities, also make math and engineering fun!

Our geoboard play tends to occur in cycles. Today, the geoboards have resurfaced after long hiatus.

Because the children haven’t used the geoboards in a while, I notice how much their brains have developed since the last time the boards were in play. Seeing these leaps of brain development is one of the great joys of teaching.

Geoboards are always developmentally appropriate in the hands of the creator. Some children simply work on stretching the rubber bands onto the nails. My “artsy” early learners—who are happy designing anything and everything—can play with these boards for hours. And there’s a child in every class who insists on attaching every single rubber band in the bag to the geoboard, persisting long after the other children have moved on to new activities.

Geoboards enable even young children—and those who may have difficulty drawing shapes—to construct and investigate the properties of early geometry without a pencil in their hands.

I see geoboards as a chance to level the playing field for those who struggle with grasp, fine-motor or visual-motor skills.

Children begin to notice shapes before they have the language to name those shapes. Geoboard play acquaints children with simple shapes—as well as more advanced concepts such as symmetry, angles and fractions—as they engage in activities such as measuring, counting or investigating 2D shapes like Parker’s rubber-band house.

Look at those little fingers and hands going to work! With just one geoboard and a bagful of rubber bands, children can create and learn about shapes while developing their hand muscles, fine-motor skills, spatial skills and math skills. This is why geoboards have been a part of our classroom curriculum for more than 30 years.

Children can use their rubber bands to create squares, rectangles, triangles and other “sided” shapes. They can also explore number concepts as they try to stretch a single rubber band around a certain number of pegs. They may try to stretch it around three or four pegs—or maybe even all of the pegs. This early math exploration evolves quite naturally as the children engage in geoboard play with their friends. 

When I introduce geoboards to new students, I leave the lesson plans and benchmark checklists for later and let the children simply play with their boards. I want them to engage in geoboard play at their own level of development.

It’s important to give the children ample time to engage in this process. It can’t be rushed. For my young learners who love to make shapes, letters and designs, a longer play period gives them time to get their creative juices flowing. As their brain development continues, you will see their shapes and designs become more intentional.

Young children develop ideas and concepts about science, technology, engineering, art and mathematics (STEAM) naturally. They think about size, shape, quantity, order and speed throughout the day as they play and explore. As teachers of young children, we need to tap into their natural curiosity with intentional STEAM learning opportunities such as geoboard play.

Intentionality is acting with knowledge and purpose. It is the opposite of chance because it is planned and thoughtful. In order to become intentional about math teaching, we need to think about math the way we think about literacy.

By making shapes on their geoboards, the children are actually developing important pre-reading and pre-writing skills too.

Here’s how it works: When Linnea sees a shape on the geoboard and names it, she is preparing herself to identify letters and numbers and then naming and eventually writing them.

Simply by placing a basket full of geoboards near a table, we can encourage children to experiment with shapes, sizes and direction through hands-on play.

We can call this math, science, engineering, art or literacy because it’s laying the groundwork for the STEAM disciplines, as well as language development.

But in our hearts—as early childhood educators—we simply call it play.

“Hey, Evelyn!  Go get your cell phone and meet me at the stumps!” calls Noa.

My head whirls around as I check the classroom to see if a cell phone has actually made its way into school today. Then I see Evelyn running to the basket of dominoes to get her “cell phone.”

Whew! Instant relief and a touch of humor added to my day.

Dominoes have been around for centuries. They’ve been used for all sorts of games around the globe. We have baskets of dominoes scattered around the classroom. We use them for everything from building and matching to chain reactions. I’m fairly sure that we’ve never played an actual game of dominoes with these versatile learning tools!

I love these little blocks. Whatever the game, dominoes are always a Developmentally Appropriate Play (DAP) item, regardless of the ages of the children playing with them.

This morning’s “cell phone” incident got me thinking about Developmentally Appropriate Practice.

We need to trust that the teachers who work with young children on a daily basis know what’s appropriate for these children and understand how they use their materials.

Dominoes may not be designed for toddlers and preschoolers—and may even be considered to be Developmentally Inappropriate if used as intended.

Yet, by adding dominoes to our play areas and using them as manipulatives and loose parts, we can expose our early learners to a wealth of STEM learning opportunities such as building, counting, matching and even dramatic play.

Whether we’re building with our dominoes or standing each domino on end to create a chain reaction, we are laying the foundation for strong math and science skills.

This is when parents and administrators may misconstrue active learning for mere play.

When this happens, it’s our responsibility to help parents and administrators “see” the learning that is taking place. Show them how their children are developing spatial skills and an understanding of concepts such as “location” and “ordinal position.”

“Wow, Michela, your tower is getting really big!” Jameson stops to watch as Michela carefully adds another block to her structure.

Jameson has been struggling to build a tower that rivals Michela’s in height. “My tower is too wobbly,” he moans. “It keeps falling down. It’s impossible!” He stomps his foot in frustration and crosses his arms over his chest.

“You need to go very slow, like this,” responds Michela without taking her eyes off of her tower.

Michela is demonstrating the practice of science and engineering. We have geometry unfolding before our eyes as Michela uses symmetry, visualization, spatial reasoning and geometric modeling to solve problems such as balance and continuity.

By observing and asking questions, sharing ideas and solving problems, the children are working as a team to build a greater understanding of what works and what doesn’t.

This is a form of early data collection. If you are studying force and motion, a domino chain reaction is a great activity to demonstrate potential and kinetic energy.

I watch as four-year-old Thompson counts the pips (dots) on his dominoes and begins exploring concepts such as quantities and attributes.

Across the table, two-year-old Joseph is learning rote counting skills and gaining a rudimentary sense of one-to-one correspondence. By playing with the dominoes, he is also seeing the grouped pips (dots) in number formations that he will continue to see throughout his life.

I watch as an older friend mentors Joseph. In no time, Joseph is matching attributes—sometimes by pattern and sometimes by color. This is math!

We are exploring concepts such as “matching,” “same and different” and “up and down.” We are counting and beginning to understand numbers and number names. We are comparing quantities, subitizing and measuring objects and quantities. We are identifying common attributes, patterns and object relationships.

We are engaged in deep, hands-on, child-led play—without worksheets, themes or circle times. This is developmentally appropriate learning!

By providing more opportunities for children to explore, discover and investigate through active play, we are meeting one of the most important goals of early childhood education.

Invest in a variety of materials to meet the needs of children with different learning styles. It’s worth the cost. Think of it as an investment that will pay off in the future success of your early learners.

So grab those dominoes off of the shelf, place them in a basket and let the STEM learning begin!

Enjoy!

“Hey, Hudson! How did you do that?”

Eleanor is amazed at Hudson’s success as he races a car down the ramp. This is the same car that she couldn’t get to stay on the ramp just minutes earlier.

I listen as Hudson turns the car over and explains, “See those wheels? The front ones were bent. I had to take my finger and straighten that part that connects them. That is why it was going crooked.”

Eleanor is completely engaged in the moment as Hudson instructs her on the physics of motion.

We have a group of kids at our center who have grown up together, developed great friendships and built a strong early math and science foundation. Science skills enrich children’s math skills and concepts through hands-on experiences. Math is used to construct and understand data that is collected through observation. You can do math without science, but you can’t do science without doing math.

In the past few weeks, I have been reminiscing about how this group’s understanding of concepts has grown right along with their physical development. We are currently ramp and incline crazy, an activity that has piqued the children’s interest in cycles over the past few years.

Recently, inclines have dominated our play once again, and we have been doing a lot of investigative activities with ramps of all types and sizes. Experiments with force, speed and motion foster the development of scientific-inquiry skills and offer endless math opportunities, as well as great fun!

When our young friends play with inclines, they often try out new ideas and techniques. I love to listen to their theories as they engage in this rudimentary scientific exploration while mentoring and encouraging one another. Their knowledge continues to grow as they experiment and observe the outcomes. This is data collection!

Once again, we are meeting those early learning standards through long periods of uninterrupted play. Not all of their ideas will work. When they don’t, this leads to deeper communication and collaboration as the children use what they’ve learned to modify their techniques.

I watch as they observe each other’s successes and failures and try to improve on their ideas and methods to achieve their goals.

Simply placing the basket of beanbags at the top of the slide is all that it takes to encourage collaboration, cooperation and a lot of giggles. Activities such as these prompt children to explore their environment and use what they learn to design new experiments and test out new ideas as they make sense of the world around them.

By offering opportunities such as these, we are laying the foundation for the mathematical concepts and skills that they will need to perform later scientific investigations.

Ramps and Inclines provide a treasure trove of opportunities to meet your math, geometry, measurement and number standards. I love to watch the children at my center as they make predictions and then test out their theories. Sometimes with success, sometimes not so much. By reflecting on their experiences, the children are constructing their own understanding and knowledge of how the world works. Counting, classifying, measuring and comparing are some of the processes that can take place when we allow long periods of uninterrupted time for exploration and discovery.

Our play experience with ramps and inclines is a perfect example of STEM learning. The physics involved in creating stable structures and moving objects in various ways will enable us to meet our science standards for the day. Engineering happens when the children design their structures or change the way they move their objects. When they draw conclusions about how objects move through space, make predictions and collect data, we have wrapped up our STEM lessons in one pretty little package of play!

Best of all, this activity is developmentally inclusive. All ages can engage in incline play. It took less than a day for our youngest learner to figure out that the object he drops from the top of the incline will slide to the bottom. This activity keeps his attention for long periods of time and his enjoyment never ceases as he conducts his incline experiments again and again.

The joy of watching young children join in the math and science play never gets old. So grab a ramp and a few young friends and start your own math and science club!

I recently grabbed our dusty box of beanbags off of the top shelf of the closet and took the beanbags outside. We rarely played with them indoors, so what was I saving them for?  If a beanbag gets lost or forgotten under the plants and soaked in the rain, who cares? At least it has been played with.

Now that the beanbags have been relocated to our outdoor play space, they have been used daily over the past few weeks. Recently we created a new beanbag game that laid the foundation for later STEM learning.

We currently have a full group of children who can pump on the swings, which is great—unless you have more children than swings, like we do. So I brought out the bucket of beanbags and placed it on the edge of the sidewalk. 

Then I picked up a beanbag and gently tossed it in the direction of my swinging friends. The kids loved the idea and it was GAME ON!

Now mind you, the swings were a good 12 feet away from that sidewalk—far enough to ensure that none of the children would be strong enough or accurate enough with their beanbag tosses to actually harm a friend.

“Hit me! Hit me!” hollered the members of the swinging gang.

“I want to play!” shouted the rest of the gang.  AYE YAE YAE!  What had I started?

What I had started was a new game that quickly became a favorite. No one has been injured, few have been hit and the cooperation and turn-taking is incredible!

Our rules were simple:

1. Throwers had to stay on the sidewalk.
2. No creeping up on the swingers.
3. Only throw one beanbag at a time.
4. When all beanbags have been thrown, yell, “SWITCH!” and the swingers must stop.

When the swingers stopped that first day, there was a mad rush by all to pick up the beanbags and put them back into the basket for the next round. WHAT in the world? I NEVER see this type of energy and enthusiasm during usual pickup times!

I encouraged the new group of throwers to take a water break to give the new swingers time to get up to speed before the throwers started aiming at their targets. And then we repeated the cycle for a good 20-30 minutes before the children exhausted themselves from all of their throwing and pumping.

We had overhand throwers and underhand throwers. I watched as they tried different techniques and shared theories with each other on the best time to throw the beanbag depending on where the swingers were in the air. This is physics! This is math and geometry and plain old fun!

Investigations into physical science and engineering through this type of play give young children a chance to explore and control physical phenomena and develop a practical understanding of the laws of physics— all while giggling with their moving-target friends.

This activity also teaches children about risk-taking and trust building. You trust that your friend won’t hurt you, but you definitely take the risk of possibly getting hit. Scary but fun!

As the game evolved, new ideas were added to the play. Sometimes children called out the number or  letter printed on the beanbag or grabbed specific colors. One three-year-old consistently looked only for beanbags labeled with letters that had meaning to him: the first letter of his name or the names of his two siblings. (I later found three beanbags labeled with those letters hidden in a secret corner of the yard. Ha!)

Physically, our beanbag throwers were building up the muscles of their dominant hands, which they will use in future academic settings. They were also working on STEM concepts such as distance, accuracy, speed and force. We throw these wonderful science words into their play to build up their STEM vocabulary and lay the foundation for a deeper understanding of scientific concepts. Meanwhile, our swingers were  focusing on the trajectories of the beanbags headed in their direction and making predictions about when and where they would hit, while strengthening their core muscles for future desk and circle time.

OH, you want learning standards? We’ve got those covered too. We count, subtilize and build our math vocabulary. We measure and estimate distance. We make predictions and modify those predictions based on experience. We use our science skills to explore the physical properties of objects and experiment with force and motion. The list goes on and on and there are so many ways to adapt this game. So grab your beanbags, head outdoors and let the playing and learning begin!

In the early childhood classroom, a teacher can use a popular directional song such as Going on a Bear Hunt and modify the movements to teaching math concepts. The lyrics can be composed by the children using the premise of going on a hunt (lion hunt, princess hunt snowman hunt etc.) to find a treasure or make it to a destination. Integrating the developmental areas of movement and math will give the teacher a perspective on the child’s ability in these areas as well. 

A board game can be created with large poster boards taped together to create a walking path. Create lines for spaces  on the boards so the children can move to and from them during the game. For this game, a large life size die would be the most fun and creative for the children. 

To introduce the game, teachers can play the bear hunt song before the game to get the children excited about the activity they are going to engage in. Then during the game, the children can roll the die and pick a directional card that says (for example), “move 3 spaces to grab your backpack for the bear hunt”. These directional cards can incorporate the theme of the song, having the child collect the items they need in order to be prepared for the hunt. After the game has been played, the teacher can play the song again to recreate connections for the children.

This game can be played as a cooperative game with young children to collectively make it to the finish line with all of the items needed for the bear hunt or as a competitive game. The children can change the rules of the game each time they play. For example, “the player that collects the backpack can automatically proceed to the finish line”, might be a rule that the children come up with.  Thus, getting the backpack makes you get to the finish line first! This technique can assist with keeping children engaged once they have mastered one set of rules. Later children can add new directional cards to the game, for example “Move 2 spaces then do 5 jumping jacks”. This can challenge children at different cognitive levels. Interactive games can increase engagement, which will give children a chance to learn new information or recall previously learned knowledge. Adding this to a classroom can be fun and engaging while promoting team building and math skills.

One strategy involves the parent or caregiver making a daily mealtime chart and marking or logging whether the child ate their meal or tried a new item; the child should be a part of this process. The chart can state the date and the number or tally mark indicating that a meal was completed that day. If a new food item was tried, that item can be logged as well. A parent or teacher can create this chart with the young child, explaining that each time they eat their meal or try a new item they will receive a mark on their meal chart. The parent can incentivize the child by including an end reward if that is a factor they want to include.

At mealtime you can have the child mark their chart and ask them “How many marks do you have today?” You can assist the child in counting the tally marks. Then, once the child states the number you can ask “If you try a new food item tomorrow, how many will you have then?” This requires the child to mentally count or add on, which is a more complex mathematical skill than simple one to one correspondence. For example, if the current tally is 5, when the young child eats a meal the next day the number would be 6. Once the numbers begin to increase the parent or caregiver can state, “You have 6 meals, if you add one more meal how many meals will you have eaten?” This statement is slightly more complex then the first, because now the child is being challenged with the concept of adding on.

Creating this chart, using it daily, then analyzing the data can be fun for young children because they have been involved in the process of creating the chart/game. This can help make mealtime an enjoyable part of their day. This mealtime game can be played at any time and any where eating takes place. It can be used for snack, dinner, lunch or even drinking water. Children tend to become more intrigued and engaged if they are involved in creating their learning tools. Mealtime can now become fun and exciting while learning!

Developmentally, young children are at a stage where playing competitive games will create conflict among players. It often takes an adult or more knowledgable other to provide appropriate guidance. Helping children to stay focused on the objectives of the game and assisting them in taking turns and playing fairly are some of the tasks adults should take on when working with young children involved in playing games.

Instead of competitive games, parents and teachers can use cooperative games to teach math, science and other content areas without the social emotional conflict of having a winner or loser. Cooperative games are suited for children at multiple developmental ages and stages. Cooperative games often include all players working together to reach the final goal. Many children enjoy playing cooperative games because they eliminate the emotional “winner” and “loser” aspect of competitive games.

Using cooperative games to help teach mathematical concepts to young children is a fun way for them to develop simple to complex mathematical thinking and skills. These games can help to introduce and reinforce different math concepts such as number recognition, composing and decomposing, and 1-to-1 correspondence. The games can start simple —the child moves the game piece the number stated on the rolled die– to more complex such as addition and subtraction.

Some examples of cooperative games that are great for teaching early math concepts are Count your Chickens,   Mermaid Island,  and Hi-Ho Cherry-O. These games help develop math skills, social/emotional skills and problem solving techniques in a non-stressful environment.  

Count your Chickens is a fun game that helps children learn counting, by having them spin the spinner and then moving the correct number of spaces to collect that number of chickens. This game can be played with preschoolers as early as age three. Once children begin to master a game, they will continue to enjoy the game until they are ready to move to a more complex game. These types of games promote positive self esteem among young children, which assists in motivating them to take on more challenging concepts.

In the classroom, a teacher can set up the environment for the children to participate in a cooperative game by introducing the game at large group time. Then, the teacher can create a sign up system for the children. Children are going to be eager to participate in the new game, so you may have lots of children wanting to participate. Make sure that all of the children understand that they will eventually have a turn playing the game.  Once the children have mastered the game, the teacher or parent can remove themselves as participants, observing the children.

Teachers and parents can use cooperative games to introduce and develop basic to complex concepts in all subjects. Games are a fun way to encourage patience, turn taking, math, science, literacy and so much more.