Instilling a Love of Math in Pre-K Students

As a former preschool teacher and now teacher trainer, I’m always reflecting on my time in the classroom and what the landscape of education looked like when I taught, versus, a few short years later, when I went into leadership. The beauty of early childhood education is that our understanding of child development is constantly changing and evolving, and we’re learning new insights about how children understand the world and how best to introduce the world to them.

I’ll admit that up until recently I was one of those people who said something like “I’m not a math person.” A good friend of mine, who very much is a math person, noted that nobody says, “I’m really not a reading person,” and this started me on a reflection of my own relationship to both how I learned math and how I taught math in the classroom.

To be clear, when I say now that I’m a “math person,” I’m not saying that I suddenly began to study complex theorems or can solve Good Will Hunting levels of equations off the top of my head. Maybe it’s better to say that I became an appreciator of mathematics and understand how important it is for even the youngest learners to start with a solid foundation.

I began looking at graphs the same way I look at a good book: I read the graph over and over again, reflect on its meaning, think about both its truths and its flaws, and debate about it with colleagues and friends. And with bold claims constantly being made with “data” to back them up, understanding how any numbers being presented tell a story—unfortunately many times an incomplete story—is a skill that preschool students are surprisingly adept at with some practice and scaffolding.

For anyone who has seen the movie or read the book Hidden Figures, you may remember that the job of Katherine Johnson and her colleagues was to serve as a “computer”—literally a person who could compute complex equations to ensure that the trajectories and navigation of space missions could be completed safely.

Modern technology has made finding accurate answers to equations infinitely easier, but schools still rely on computation and calculation courses for children. To be clear, I’m not arguing against teaching students basic calculation—addition of whole numbers is a foundational skill that children need to learn to function in society. Instead, I’d like to propose that we open up our idea of what math can be, especially in the preschool landscape.

Terminology such as cardinality or subitization may not be something you’re having your 3-year-old learners memorize, but they’re critical parts of a basic understanding of math. Understanding math isn’t just about counting to 10, writing a number, or memorizing the names of a number. It’s also about more complex topics, two of which I’d like to highlight here.

Conservation

The concept of conservation is the subject of a famous study by theorist Jean Piaget, who declared that young children do not understand that just because you move a liquid from one size container to another size container, it doesn’t actually change the amount of liquid in the container. While some more recent studies have questioned this assertion, the concept of conservation is still a tricky one for children to tackle.

For example, try lining up five toys and have your preschool students count them. Then, mix the toys up into a circle and ask the group how many there are. Some will count and come to the same conclusion, some will get mixed up (this doesn’t even begin to address the fact that children may need to have a way of marking their start and end points while counting), and others will proudly announce “Five” without counting—showing their understanding of conservation.

The fun part comes when you ask the preschool class why the number of toys didn’t change—as one of my 4-year-old students put it, “All you did was move them around.” This opens up a whole world of understanding how quantities may or may not change and leads into concepts such as measurement; “more, less, or the same”; or estimation. 

Data Sets

In our morning meeting routine, my classroom used to answer the “Question of the Day” by using a photograph of themselves to mark their preferences on a graph. For example, I’d ask the children questions such as “What is your favorite color?” “Do you have the letter ‘A’ in your name?” or “What was your favorite book we read this week?”

I set up a poster with a handful of pictures of the choices being asked. The children would then place their photograph over their answer, and we had a nice, ready-to-go, bar graph. Using this strategy, we could open up questions about what data we had in front of us.

What does it mean if one column is taller than the rest? What does it mean if there are no pictures next to one of the choices? We could even expand into open-ended questions—“Why do you think everybody liked this book?” “Yesterday, only one person wore a red shirt, but today everyone is wearing one. I wonder why that is?” (Note: It was Valentine’s Day.)

Data always tells a story, and even young children can create stories by looking at the numbers in front of them. And, as I alluded to earlier, data can give a false implication. For example, did you know that on average, Denzel Washington and I have one Academy Award each? (Denzel’s 2 awards + my 0 awards = 2; 2/2 = an average of 1 each.) After you’ve thought that statement through, think about what it might mean if everyone in the classroom picked the same favorite snack in your data set. Does it mean the other snacks are bad? Of course not, it just means that everyone was in the mood for this particular snack today. Understanding that data tells a story also means understanding that data doesn’t tell the whole story all the time. 

And that’s the beauty of preschool mathematics—it’s not just about counting and memorizing, it’s also about reflecting and analyzing. So this is my challenge to you, fellow early childhood educators: Find something you love about numbers, and embrace it wholeheartedly with your preschool students. They’re counting on you to lead the way!