A kindergartner demonstrates how high he can count.

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.

A child directly compares the lengths of two crayons to determine which one is shorter.

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.

A child explains the attendance chart he uses in class.

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.

Children who have strong spatial reasoning abilities also have an advantage when it comes to learning the number line and solving math problems, researchers at the University of Chicago say.

For more information about this topic or for ideas for classroom activities, take a look at our resources on geometry, or the more specific topic areas of shape and spatial relationships.

Recent research suggests that young children’s first ideas about math might be in the form of very basic statistics.

Me on the Map by Joan Sweeney and Where Do I Live? by Neil Chesanow are two books that give children a way to explore where they are in relationship to other things and places. After reading Me on the Map, children may be eager to make maps of their own bedrooms or the classroom.

They are equally likely to think of taking the voyage from their own homes to outer space and back the way the child does in Where Do I Live? In either case, there will be plenty of opportunity for the children to explore the idea of scale and to work on the relational language that is necessary to define movement and direction.