Do You Play Math Games With Your Children?

While playing a math game with one of our tutoring students in our Menlo Park office recently, we were reminded of something we read not long ago in the March 28th, 2012 edition of Education Week.  A commentary in that publication entitled, “Math Matters, Even for Little Kids,” indicates that early (students as young as pre-kindergarten) math learning is an even more powerful predictor of academic success than early literacy and early social-emotional development.  The mechanism by which early math learning leads to more favorable academic outcomes is not understood, but the findings gave us pause to consider the benefits (beyond plain fun) that playing math games with our students can engender and to encourage parents to do the same.

The article notes that on average, pre-school programs do not place a great deal of emphasis on math activities that are aimed at effectively developing the right kind of math fluency, i.e. “number sense” of youngsters and laments that:

the most commonly encountered activities in preschool are among the least effective for teaching children math. Learning to count by rote teaches children number words and their order, but it does not teach them number sense, any more than singing the letters L-M-N-O-P in the alphabet song teaches phonemic awareness. Knowing that "four" follows "three" is of minimal value if a child doesn't know what "four" means. Paper-and-pencil tasks (e.g., drawing a line from the numeral 4 to a picture of four apples; coloring in an outline of the numeral 4) are fine for practice, but they don't teach children a sense of number.

Touching on areas ranging from curriculum development to teacher training of early-childhood educators, the article emphasizes that addressing the issue need not deteriorate into a zero-sum “either or” solution.  The right kind of math can be taught without overly academizing the experience of early school, i.e. “meaningful math activities in the context of play can foster crucial aspects of children's development.”

All of this is to say that to achieve the goal of “helping children develop, discuss, and use efficient, accurate, and generalizable methods to solve mathematical problems, young children need problems to solve and latitude to construct their own strategies” and that such experiences can take place in the context of puzzles and games.

So what can you do? Build on what young children know in ways that children enjoy. For example, playing mathematical or strategy games such as Chutes and Ladders or tic-tac-toe can build math and problem-solving skills while also developing social skills (e.g., turn taking and cooperation), early-language skills, and cognitive self-regulation.  Buy a shape sorter to help your child learn the properties of geometric objects (e.g., three-sided or round figures don't fit in four-sided holes), not simply their names.  Bake cookies with your child and have him or her develop a solution to sharing a plate of them that both builds rudimentary division skills and helps promote social skills.

What are some of the math games that you play or have played with your children?

http://www.qwertyed.com/blog/play-math-games-your-children

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