Math Manipulative’s in Early Childhood Education

[ad_1]

Do you have students struggling to grasp basic math concepts such as sorting, numeracy, or operations? Using math manipulatives is the key to helping young children learn abstract math concepts in a concrete way. It is imperative that in the early learning years children be given hands-on math manipulatives to begin to explore math concepts that will be the foundation for all future logical mathematical learning.

Basic foundations for teaching math are sorting and classifying and numeracy. To teach sorting and classifying teachers should use manipulative’s that have similar and different qualities- for example, plastic animal figurines. These may be similar in that they have the same number or legs, are the same size, have the same colors, etc. However, they may also differ in that they are different shapes or have other different attributes. Students can visually see these similarities and difference and then sort or classify them accordingly. The idea here is that you gave the student something concrete to determine how they relate to each other rather than simply stating. “How is a zebra the same, or different from a bear?”

Along these same lines, you could ask a child to show you a “2”. They may simply draw a “2”. But, do they truly know that this is simply a symbol and that there is an actual quantity this number symbol represents. You can teach the numeracy concepts by using plastic counters, or household objects like kidney beans, etc. Children must have a representation of what our number symbols mean before they can move forward into learning operations such as addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.

Using math manipulative’s in the early years will help build those basic foundations to later allow students to think more abstractly as they progress through mathematical concepts.

[ad_2]

Source by Dawn Castellanos