Exposure to numbers through everyday life, through books as well as actual practice, will encourage our children to become more comfortable with math at an early age, and give them them the foundation they need for future skills.
Susan Levine, a psychology professor in University of Chicago, released a new study showing that simply repeating the numbers isn't as good as helping kids understand what they mean. For children to develop the math skills they'll need later on in school, it is essential that parents spend time teaching their children the value of numbers by using concrete examples — instead of just repeating them out loud.
Toddlers might say the numbers in order, but that doesn't mean they actually understand what they represent.
Levine's study looked at children whose ages ranged from about 1 to 2-and-a-half. The study followed a set of 60 families. Every 4 months, researchers would visit a family's home and videotape the everyday interactions between the parents and their children.
Some kids heard as few as 4 number words from their parents during a session. Also, the team noticed, the parents tended to engage their children in various kinds of number talk, from reciting number words to actually counting objects. The study found that counting objects is more effective.
The study also found that 4-year-olds who talked more about numbers and participated in counting activities did better at number tasks than others. Whether this head start becomes a lifelong advantage is yet to be seen. Many of the children in Levine's study are now in the third and fourth grade. Her team plans to keep monitoring the kids as long as possible.
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