Preschool Math

Teaching preschool math takes place in all of your activities throughout your day. Keeping in mind that children learn best by doing, by manipulating their environment, by play, our goal as educators is to teach preschool math using these concepts.

Learning about numbers, counting and how these relate to them in their world is introducing logic and logical ways of thinking to a preschool child. We need to provide the means for them to explore patterns, concepts, problem solving in a playful and meaningful way.

Offer the following opportunities to your students when you are teaching preschool math and observe their play, their responses and let them show you how they are understanding the concepts and where you can then add, continue or change teaching strategies to help them understand the world of numbers.

Number Hunt

Make a set of number cards, 1-5 or 1-10, depending on your children’s abilities. I like to make the cards resemble a shape, for example I use circles and decorate them to look like cookies and put one number on each card. Hide these cards around the room before they arrive.

To start this, tell them that the number cookies are hidden around the room and that they need to find them. Once they find the numbers, they will need to decide if they have found them all. To do this they will need to put them in order. For older children, they will know how to count to ten but for younger ones you can have the numbers on the board and they can match their “found” numbers to the ones on the board to see if they have found them all.

Graphing Ideas

Graphing is an excellent way of illustrating numbers and what they represent. You can have the children form their own human graph.

Clear an area in the room. Make a line with masking tape and write the numbers 1-10 on the line. Ask each child how many people are in their family and have them stand on the floor above the line for the correct number in their family. After everyone has their place on the line on the floor, make a vertical line with the tape on the right side of everyone with the numbers 1-10.

Make a mark on the correct number for the number of the people in the first line, then proceed for each line of students. Show them that they have formed a human graph to represent the numbers. You can then draw the same graph on the board to show them how it would look on paper. When they do the actual activity, they grasp the concept.

Combine Counting and Art

Have the children color a fish picture; each picture has a number on it from 1 to 10.

Next get all the plastic food from the home corner ( you will need 55 pieces!). If you don't have this available the children can use any kind of marker, stone, etc as pretend food.

Spread their fish pictures along the floor.Space is needed for this one. Then ask one of the children how many pieces of food will you give the fish with number 1 on it? Allow the child to put one piece of food on that fish.

The ask another child how many pieces of food for number 2 and have the child count out 2 piece and lay it on fish number 2, and so on to fish number 10.

As you know preschool math is not an isolated topic to only be taught at one time in your day. Take advantage of any and all opportunities to talk about math, numbers and helping them make the connections between the logic of numbers and their everyday lives. This can happen in preschool art class, on a nature walk, at snack time, even naptime. It is part of their world!

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