Encouraging Early Numeracy

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Juggling Numbers — Image courtesy of digitalart / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

We’ve touched on the importance of helping our children develop a strong foundation in Math in an earlier article, but here’s more about the benefits of teaching children math and starting early…

Why is Math Important?

1. Young children have an innate intuition with math

“A lot of children find symbolic arithmetic quite difficult and tedious” but when presented with mathematical tasks in the form of games (similar to the way Little Math is presented), the children enjoyed it.

2. Early exposure strengthens the mathematical foundation and helps to provide positive, successful early experiences that lead to future interest and confidence in the subject.

3. Math helps children learn, understand, and think more deeply about the world – it encourages inventive thinking, logical deduction, problem solving, and reasoning.

4. Math teaches children life skills – math proficiency helps with financial management, e.g. keeping a budget, determining if an item on clearance is a good deal, buying a car without getting ripped off, running a business, etc.

5. Careers and future employment – even basic jobs like working as a cashier require some basic math skills.

Image Source: National Math and Science Initiative

Building a Strong Foundation in Math

Early exposure with programs like Little Math are terrific for developing that innate understanding of numeracy that all children have in early childhood. You can continue to foster the interest by making Math fun with entertaining mathematical programs like Splash Math Online (don’t miss the giveaway and promotion for this month!) and Dragon Box (for teaching children algebra). These are just some of the programs we have used that have had a significant impact on my boys.