I am hoping for some guidance for teaching my daughter math concepts. She is 15 months old, and she currently knows her shapes, some directions such as up/down, in/out, etc., and she knows and recognizes numerals 1-10 in any setting (ie. written on paper, foam numbers, and even on signs). We play a game where we call out a number and she walks over to the number on her foam mat and either points to it or brings it to us. She tries to count things randomly on her own although she says one, two over and over. She also tries to count on her fingers. I’m not sure that she understands one to one correspondence at this point. We haven’t worked on it a lot yet. Is she too young? For reference, we are currently doing math dots (hoping to get LM soon). What else can we do to encourage math knowledge?
Some theorists believe one to one correspondence is impossible this young, but both my daughters learned it young. It helps to have a physical reason to practice: we have three dolls, so how many bottles do we need? Let’s get them and count. And so on.
I really like the idea of subitizing, or recognizing quantities without counting, but it’s easiest for me to use the right start method and subitize up to five, then learn 6 as 5 and 1, etc. You can also just practice counting. Both are important, but I find subitizing easier at this age.
Once she can count or subitize, you can do almost any math you choose. My personal goal is to do some math every time I read to my kids. It takes creativity, but it works really well, since we read a lot.
There has been recently a thread on Mortensen math and my 4 year old is starting with that method. I also have a 16 month old and she loves it too. We play “put it in the cup” where I give her a one block for example and say --this is one, put it in the cup. Then, this is two. Put it in the cup. She LOVES this. When we get all the blocks in the cup we stir them with a ten block. Sometimes we count the units on each block. She’ll point at them when she wants me to do this. We can later do skip counting this way for example counting four blocks 4, 8, 12 etc. Or addition. You could do this with any math blocks I imagine.
Wolfwind, I’m glad to read a first hand account of someone whose young kids learned this concept very young. I will move forward with teaching it. That’s a good idea to have her need to count like in your doll example. I would love for her to able to subitize. I haven’t tested her with math dots at all. We haven’t been consistent with them lately.
Mybabyian, what a great idea to adjust a math program like Mortensen math. I need to go back and read that thread and do more research on the different options out there like Mortensen and Rightstart. How wonderful that your 16 month old is already loving the math blocks. I am going to look into getting some as soon as possible.
thanks for sharing really helps me to teach my kids math counting