Whole Child Development
In our school district, there’s a late start day each week to allow for teacher prep. If I’m on my mommy A-game, I like to use this little extra bubble of time to do some hands-on science activities with my boys. This morning, as I urged my boys to step away from their exploration of household acids and pack up for the day, I jokingly said, “Enough science boys. It’s time to go to school.”
Numbers can be a pretty abstract concept for a preschooler to wrap her mind around. But just as a storybook turns abstract letters into a meaningful story, the abstract concepts of numeracy, patterning, and comparison find real meaning in the objects they represent. Putting these real objects into the small hands of young children makes the abstract concrete as we connect these math terms and concepts with experiences and understandings they’ve been building over a lifetime.
Numbers can be a pretty abstract concept for a preschooler to wrap her mind around. But just as a storybook turns abstract letters into a meaningful story, the abstract concepts of numeracy, patterning, and comparison find real meaning in the objects they represent. Putting these real objects into the small hands of young children makes the abstract concrete as we connect these math terms and concepts with experiences and understandings they’ve been building over a lifetime.
As I sat in the waiting room of a doctor’s office not too long ago, I flipped through a family magazine and was taken aback by an advertisement. The picture showed a mother with a baby in her lap, both looking enthusiastically at a computer screen as flashcard-like images of apples and dogs and the Eiffel Tower played before them. In bold letters, the advertisement promised a computer program that would make your (otherwise dreadfully average) child a genius.
Content Copyrighted (2008-2025), Amanda Morgan, All Rights Reserved
