Math Skills

Preschool

What We Saw: One child was playing with some small cars during choice time. He placed them out on the table in three rows. He told his teacher, "Look, this looks like a parking garage." She responded, "It does, you lined them all up. Now it is time to clean up. Can you place them into the container nicely?" He began to line the cars up into the container just like he did out on the table. One car did not fit in a small space that was left in the container. He said, "That one is too big, I need a little one." He made a few attempts with cars that did not fit, but then he finally found one small enough to fit right into the space in the container. He said, "Look, I did it. They all fit." The teacher responded, "You lined then all up in the container just like you did on the table!"

What It Means: Through manipulation of items in his environment this child was learning about the mathematical concept of capacity. Through experimentation he learned that only a certain amount of cars could fit into the container according to their size and shape. Through his attempts, he was determining the capacity of the container. By using trial and error, he figured out that he needed a very small car to fit into that last space in the container.

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More Math Promising Practices

Preschool

What We Saw: Two children were playing in the block corner. One called to their teacher and said, "Come over here and see what we did." The teacher went over and noticed that they had built blocks all around a baby doll. The teacher commented, "Your baby is safe now because she is inside the blocks." The children were so excited that they began to jump around the structure, but they did not know what to do next. The teacher asked them, "What else do you want to make for your baby?" They thought about it, then began to build their blocks up very high. One child said, "We will build a very, very tall crib for the baby to sleep on." When finished, they placed the baby on top of the blocks, and everything came tumbling down. The children laughed and one said, "The baby fell down and is hurt." The teacher responded, "It was too high for the baby, try again." The children began to build some more.

What It Means: Math concepts are being learned here. Children must learn the basic prepositional concepts such as inside / outside, on / under before they can master more advanced concepts, like ordering objects from little to many or from short to long. Eventually this leads to the understanding of numbers, and then onward to arithmetic. But mathematical learning starts with experiences like this one, where an interested adult helps children begin to label their own creations with words like "inside" and "on top of" which describe relationships between objects. Social skills are being learned here. Instead of making their own individual block structures, the children cooperated in a joint project. Two and 3-year olds often play together in the block corner, but it is usually parallel play, in which each builds their own project. By age 4, truly cooperative play is possible, as we see in this classroom. They must negotiate a plan and act in concert, no small thing! They are learning to take into account the viewpoints of other people. This teacher did only a little, but what she did was important and skillful. First she provided a fantasy meaning to the structure ("Your baby is safe now…"), which was highly motivating to the children. She encouraged independent thinking by asking them an open-ended question. In the end, she encouraged them to think of a better solution, so the baby wouldn't fall.