During lockdown when we were all homeschooling, I was forever trying to find new and fun ideas to help with maths. I hate to admit it but mathematics was never my strong subject and I was finding it hard teaching it to my kids. I guess for my daughter who is still only at pre-school its a little easier to find ideas. She is getting familiar with her letters but we are still working on numbers and counting. So I introduced number recognition.
If you have magnetic letters and Duplo in the house they are great tools to teach counting.
My daughter can recognize numbers from 1-5 but struggles after that so this activity helped her to become familiar with the numbers. We worked only to 10 to start us off. We stacked up the Duplo in towers starting at 1 and working up to 10.
This is a good opportunity for your child to count as they’re stacking.
She did notice that each time we made a new tower we added another block.
She then counted the blocks tower by tower. She worked out pretty quickly that the next tower would be a number up, for instance when she got to 3 blocks she figured that the next block would be 4 and so on. I had her find the correct numbers that she needed to line up at the blocks. She managed okay up to 5 then she needed a little help.
A little help at this stage is good though as it’s all about practice. Once they start to see what the numbers look like they soon learn to pick them out when prompted. This is what we are working on at this stage.
Next we took it to the next level and introduced addition. She has seen her big brother do addition before and he will often get her to add up by using her toys or snacks. So we thought we would give this a try using the Duplo and numbers.
We started off small of course just so she could get an idea of what addition is. I placed 1 block next to an addition sign and 2 blocks on the other side. Then I gently prompted her to count the blocks. She was proud when she guessed 3 and I told her that was right.
You can use whatever you have around the playroom to help with math. There are lots of different activities to teach math (which I am now learning more) 😆 This is just one of them!
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