Helping children develop their early childhood numeracy skills can have a profound impact on their future math skills during school years. That is because these skills are part of the foundation of math learning including logical reasoning, problem solving, and observing patterns. This course aims to offer you strategies to support your child’s early childhood numeracy development as your child’s caregiver or first teacher.

There are many benefits to using these strategies. The first and foremost benefit is that you can make learning not feel like learning at all for both you and your child. These strategies will help you integrate numeracy learning seamlessly into your everyday interactions, activities, and routines, and make numeracy learning more fun and enjoyable for both you and your child.

By completing this course, you will learn to facilitate play-based learning at home or in an early childhood education environment. You will gain skills in observing children's interest and curiosities, which would help you guide children's learning.

Whether your role is a parent, caregiver, or early childhood educator, the strategies and theories you learn will allow your child could benefit from building a strong foundation in numeracy skills and cultivating their confidence to succeed in math during their future school years.

Contents and Overview

This course contains 16 lectures and 60 minutes of content. It is designed for anyone who is a caregiver or educator of children in their early childhood years, which is from birth to the age of 8.

The following are the key topics in this course:

1) Stages of Early Numeracy Development

2) Make Numeracy Part of Everyday Life

3) Communication Techniques

4) Teaching and Learning Numeracy for Children

5) Numeracy Development through Storytelling

6) Do-It-Yourself Math Toys and Activities

In this course, you will first learn about the stages of early numeracy development, which will provide you with an overview of a child’s developmental abilities and milestones. This will give you the foundation to understand the stages your child is going through and to choose the appropriate strategies that could support and enhance your child’s numeracy skill development. This will help you apply both age-appropriate and developmental stage-appropriate strategies to optimize children's learning. You will also learn about innate numeracy skills that children are born with. By understanding how children think and their cognitive ability in understanding numbers and quantities will help you see learning through the lens of children and become a better teacher.

Next, you will learn concrete strategies to infuse numeracy learning into your everyday life. These strategies will offer you ways to introduce, reinforce, and advance your child’s numeracy skills depending on the stage of development they are at. You will learn about various techniques and principles of learning to create learning contexts and play-based activities for your child. You will understand that for children, any environment or setting can become an opportunity for learning. You will also gain skills in navigating spontaneous learning moments that arise to facilitate impactful learning.

After that, you will learn ways to support your child’s numeracy development during their early school years. This course will show you strategies that will support your child’s learning of other numeracy-related skill sets in school, such as patterning, geometry, and measurements. Very often, parents and teachers focus heavily on numbers and operations when it comes to mathematics learning. The skill sets in patterning, geometry, and measurements are equally important and valuable. You will learn ways to build a strong foundation in mathematics for children.

And finally, you will learn to facilitate numeracy development through storytelling. Just as children have an innate ability to understand numbers and quantities, they also have an innate ability to understand language. They have an innate sense of wonder and curiosity that could be brought out through reading and listening to stories. Storybooks with a math focus are excellent resources. I will show you examples of Math Storybooks and how you can integrate them into early childhood numeracy development. Then I will discuss the research and theories behind the effectiveness of facilitating numeracy development through storytelling.

This course will end with examples of how you can create math toys and activities with children to optimize the learning experience for them. These examples and ideas will show you how to create and use concrete learning tools, which are extremely important for you to model mathematical ideas and make thinking visible as a facilitator of learning. For children, math toys are also tools that help them see patterns and relationships, make connections between the concrete and the abstract, remember how they solved a problem, test and confirm their logical reasoning, and communicate their ideas and reasoning to others.

Learning Outcomes

1) Create learning contexts that allow children to use their innate numeracy skills

2) Facilitate children's learning of numbers and quantities through play and other daily activities

3) Use principles of Universal Design for Learning to identify children’s interests, curiosities, and inquiries in numeracy skills development

4) Use effective communication techniques to facilitate numeracy learning