Who is Napping Video

In this example video, we see teachers conduct the activity and encourage children to describe the pattern in The Napping House.

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This blog post provides some great ideas for first grade <https://earlymath.erikson.edu/exploring-math-talks-math-problems-for-2nd-grade/>Number Talks sessions. These 10-15 minute activities can be centered around the rekenrek or dot cards and are designed to reinforce students’ understanding of number and quantity.

Preschool storytime is a great time to teach mathematics! In this video, two teachers use Ellen Stoll Walsh’s Mouse Count to illustrate the concept of “less and more.” Students role-play either as the snake, who collects mice for dinner one by one, or the mice, who eventually outsmart the snake and escape one by one. Using role-playing and storytelling provides younger students a jumping-off point for learning more abstract math ideas.

Math can be intimidating for many students, because it appears to be abstract and detached from the real world. Ms. Sheila Houston is among a growing group of teachers who are attempting to individualize their lessons to connect with each students’ unique interests and abilities.

Ms. Houston is a first grade teacher at St. Margaret of Scotland School. She has been attending our workshops in partnership with the Big Shoulders Fund, which works with the Office of Catholic Schools.

In the first cycle of these after-school workshops, they spent one 3-hour session intensively planning how participants could tailor a lesson plan developed by the Early Math Collaborative to help their students understand growing patterns.

The lesson revolved around the book The Napping House by Audrey Wood.

The research lesson was designed with preK-K students in mind, but it is always important to be able to “scale up” such lessons for primary. While Ms. Houston’s first graders loved The Napping House and the activities in the research lesson, Ms. Houston realized that they were ready and capable of going further and digging deeper. She pondered on how to use ideas that came up in the planning session. She was particularly attracted by the idea of having children write their own books showing a growing pattern, as in The Napping House.

When Ms. Houston invited her students to write their own books, several didn’t want to create a “napping house” of their own, so she asked them what they might want to do instead. One little girl, who probably had fashion in mind, suggested shopping. However, the boys in the class were more interested in what might be tasty for a Super Bowl party.

Ms. Houston immediately saw an opportunity to reinforce another very important lesson she knows the children in her class need to think about: nutrition and the importance of healthy diets. So together the class developed a list of healthy foods—Google research gave them a long list of foods—complete with pictures so each child had plenty of individual choices.

Ms. Houston knew there was more differentiating to do as the children’s number sense covered a broad span. She gave each child a different number of items to start from and then asked them to create a shopping cart of healthy foods, with each subsequent child adding 10 pieces of another healthy food. In the end every child in her class at every level of ability will have their work “published” in a laminated and bound edition.

While the story Nilah wrote (available to download below as a PDF file [6.1 MB]) is surely a sign of a future award-winning author, let’s not forget that Ms. Houston’s intentional teaching and differentiation means every child is given the opportunity to learn and succeed.

Growing Pattern Example

Reading a “touch-and-feel” book or singing an action song with a baby or toddler is setting the groundwork for mathematical thinking and future school success. That’s the point of Math All Around Me (MAAM), a joint program between Early Math Collaborative and the Ounce of Prevention Fund, established to study the math capabilities of children ages 0-3.

As the title might suggest, this program is not about flashcards; rather, the aim is to help child care workers deepen their understanding of how math in the school years depends on creating habits of mind from early infancy. When children interact with a page in their favorite touch-and-feel book, they are developing the understanding that everything we perceive with our senses has many different attributes and that these attributes can be named.

That kind of sorting and precise categorization develops rapidly from birth on. It starts with general groups—same and different, like and don’t like—and grows more complicated from there.

As any parent or grandparent can tell you, by the time they are one, children have quite precise ideas about the attributes they approve and desire, as well as a specific list of people, food, toys, and books that have those attributes. As children develop the language and understandings they need to make sense of the world around them, they are developing the precision and logical thinking that characterizes mathematics.

Erikson’s Jie-Qi Chen and Mary Hynes-Berry explain that attributes and comparison are precursor concepts of mathematical thinking; that is, these concepts are the ground on which foundational mathematical understanding is built. In the fall of 2015 they will continue to work with over 80 Chicago caregivers to explore two other concepts they see as precursors: pattern and change.

“It’s so exciting to do this work,

A child is pushed to decipher the repeating pattern in an array of blocks. The kindergartener considers several of the blocks’ attributes before finalizing an answer. Then he attempts to continue the pattern on his own.

Focus on the Child videos are taken from one-on-one interviews with individual children. The interviews are designed to elicit evidence of children’s mathematical thinking. They are not teaching episodes or formal assessments.