What Math Skills Should Parents Count On Their Children Having Before Kindergarten?

Learning to count isn’t always easy, but getting a head start on teaching math concepts at home is definitely something parents can do to give their children an advantage before entering kindergarten.

As young children learn their 1-2-3’s, they need to be aware of the items they’ve already counted and not leave any numbers out.

As young children learn their 1-2-3’s, they need to be aware of the items they’ve already counted and not leave any numbers out. Math teachers call that a one-to-one correspondence, which means kids should only count an object in a set once, with one touch per object. If they have five cookies in front of them, one number should be assigned to each cookie. It’s a lot for a young child to keep track of, so working with numbers at home can make a big difference when learning at school.

Children also need to know about number sense when learning to count, which means a number can stand for…a number of things! It can start with looking at a row of cars, a bunch of building blocks, or a pile of crayons. And even though it’s sometimes challenging for young learners to grasp that the number 6 is less than 9, they must learn how to understand the concept before the first day of kindergarten.

Learning can happen anywhere, and there are always things around that can be used as teaching tools for counting.

Luckily, learning can happen anywhere, and there are always things around that can be used as teaching tools for counting. Spending time counting fingers and toes every night with your child helps familiarize him or her with the sequence in which the words for 1 to 10 are said.

As your child grows and develops, there are more real-world activities that can help prepare him or her for kindergarten and also teach counting and math skills. Here are some fun ways to go about teaching mathematics:

Setting the table allows kids to collect a number of items (like four spoons) and then lay them on the table and count as they go.
Talk to your child about how many items there are in his or her collection of trucks, bracelets, stuffed animals, etc. Take an inventory and count them out!
When grocery shopping, children can help with activities like getting five bananas or six cans of soup or counting how many people are in the checkout line.
Play games with your child! Many involve counting–whether counting aloud as a game piece moves around the board, keeping score during a game, or in some other way.
There are also many toys that teach numbers and shapes while actively engaging children as they play.

ABCmouse can also teach elementary school children math skills by making learning fun, interactive, and exciting, with lessons that follow a Step-by-Step Learning Path that builds as they go along. Improving math skills takes practice! Whether at home or in the classroom, games, repetition, and engaging activities help students learn number recognition, simple math concepts, and counting. And when math problems are fun, they can help children graduate to more complex numbers and word problems! Growing a student’s understanding of math in many different ways is important as he or she approaches middle school and beyond.

Count the ways you love learning with your child and solve problems together. If math is fun for the whole family, then as a child enters school, math can become a subject he or she is already confident in and will want to conquer even more!