preschool

Foolproof ways to introduce math concepts to young children

Are you introducing your children to math concepts or do you think they are too young? There is no such thing as too young! We can begin to plant the seeds of what we want children to learn from a very early age. Never underestimate the learning power of your child. How do you think we children who can play the piano or read at 1 or 2 years old? Its because somebody said, “hey let’s try this!”

Today I did a “live” video on Instagram showing the ways in which we can teach emerging counting and cardinality, recognizing, comparing and classifying patterns and algebraic thinking! The video is geared toward the parents and teachers of young children.

For me the best part was that I only used on tool to teach all of those skills! As a parent or a teacher of young children you can do the same thing. I will put a link to the counting bears that I used in my video, but you can also use things around the house like different size spoons, marbles, beans, beads, combs makeup brushes.

Take some time today and try the strategies that I shared with you and let me know how it goes!

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Getting Smart with Common Core Standards

The Common Core is a set of uniform learning standards that were created to describe the skills that students should have at each level of learning. The idea was that if we have one set of challenging academic standards then it would improve achievement and college readiness.

The standards are the same across the board in all but 7 states.  Four of those seven states (AK, TX, NE, VA) never adopted the standards, while (OK, IN, SC) adopted the standards then changed their minds.  Why is this important? Because if a family moved to a different state sometimes the rigor of the lessons was not the same, causing a gap in learning or engagement. For instance, in my senior year, I lived in Alabama. Before the move, all of my schoolings happened in Ohio. I only had two classes left to take in my senior year. Once I moved to Alabama, I was behind the curve and had to take a full load of classes to gain enough credits to graduate with my class. That is because the standards for learning in Ohio were not the same as the standards in Alabama.

There has been, and probably still is a lot of controversy around the implementation and understanding of the CC standards. This blog is not to debate the legitimacy of the standards but to work with what we have.

One complaint that was prevalent in the early childhood world was that some of the CC skills were too advanced for 1st and 2nd graders. They didn’t have the previous knowledge that was necessary to tackle those skills.

One thing that I have worked hard at is having an understanding of the Common Core standards and how they connect to the Michigan Early Childhood Standards of Quality.