Math Talk for Toddlers and Pre-Schoolers: As Easy as 1, 2, 3!

The Importance of Early Math Skills

Most adults know the importance of reading to young children. Storytime is a wonderful way to bond with kids, develop their empathy and emotional awareness, and introduce them to vocabulary they’ll need to succeed in school. But parents and caregivers may not be aware that math matters for young children. In fact, in an important study of school readiness and later achievement, the authors found that the best predictor of academic success is not literacy or attention span, but math skills at kindergarten entry. 

It is also widely recognized that children who start school with poor math skills rarely catch up to their peers. According to researchers Alan Schoenfeld and Deborah Stipek, “(t)hose least prepared are disproportionately children of color and from low-income families.” This underscores that the achievement gap is rooted in disparities in kindergarten readiness.

Although we know early math skills are a key predictor of later academic achievement, an astonishing, and growing, number of students have not mastered even basic elementary math skills. We often hear in New Jersey that our schools are some of the best in the nation. Yet the most recent data show that overall, fewer than 40% of NJ students score at or above proficiency in math – testing below pre-pandemic levels for the third year in a row. More specifically, the percentage of 3rd graders meeting or exceeding expectations on the math portion of the New Jersey Student Learning Assessment (NJSLA) is approximately 48% and for 8th graders, it is about 19%. The sad truth is that children who aren’t proficient by 3rd grade almost never catch up to their peers. This is nothing to be proud of.

How Parents and Caregivers Can Support Early Math Development

What can parents and child care providers do to enhance young children’s math skills in order to help support their kindergarten readiness and the likelihood of future academic success? The good news is that worksheets and flashcards are not required! Instead, adults can start by noticing and pointing out to young children that math is everywhere. “Math talk” is the key. Engage children in conversations that weave math into daily life. 

• • • • Count everyday objects like the number of legs your pets have.
      • Compare sizes–which friend or family member is taller or shorter? 
      • Identify a pattern on a striped shirt–red, blue, red, blue; which color comes next? 
      • Ask what shapes a child can identify in a room: a door is a rectangle, a doorknob is a circle, a window might have panes that are squares or triangles, etc.  
      • Work together to measure a cup of rice or other ingredients while cooking dinner, or count scoops of ice cream for dessert. 

The more you start to talk about math, the more you, and the children, will see that it is in fact all around us.

There are helpful tools available that parents and child care providers can utilize to make math fun and engaging. Bedtime Math is a free app that combines reading and math into one experience. Every day, the app serves up a wacky, kid-friendly blurb for adults to read to children on topics like flamingos, pillow forts, and taco-copters. After each blurb, there are math questions to ask the kids at different levels of challenge: Wee Ones, Little Kids, and Big Kids. It takes just 5 or 10 minutes, and research shows that using Bedtime Math even twice a week can help kids make significant gains in their math achievement.

Other highly regarded early math apps include: 

• • • • Khan Academy Kids 
      • PBS’ Peg + Cat
      • Kahoot! Numbers

All of these encourage mathematical thinking and can be great starting points for families and child care providers to have math conversations in enjoyable ways for kids.

Why Math Literacy Matters for Everyone

Some may argue that math is less relevant in a world where calculators, computers, and now artificial intelligence, are at our fingertips. However, as important and convenient as these tools are, humans still need to judge the accuracy of the information they provide. All of us, not just those in STEM careers, need basic math literacy to understand the world we live in–whether to determine if a sale at the grocery store represents real savings, how to negotiate a car or home purchase, or how to correctly calculate a tip. Let’s raise our next generation to be mathematically confident critical thinkers. It all starts with early math talk!