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.
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
This lecture will provide you with a more detailed description of the course. You will learn about the importance of guiding children’s early numeracy development. This lecture will also provide you with the learning outcomes of the course.
You will learn about the stages of development in understanding quantities and numbers from a child’s birth to preschool years, and to their early years in formal schooling. Understanding the stages of early numeracy development will give you the foundation to create appropriate learning contexts for children to develop their numeracy skills.
In this lecture, you will learn about the innate skill known as, subitizing. It is a skill that allows us to recognize quantities. You will learn the details involved in the cognitive process when children are first learning to count. Understanding these fundamental skills will help you facilitate numeracy learning for children.
This lecture will provide you with strategies to introduce, reinforce, and advance numeracy learning through many common daily routines or activities in a child’s life. Depending on the age and stage of development of the child, you can adopt or refine strategies that best fit a child’s needs.
In this lecture, you will learn about the two main types of social interactions and the different types of play. You will learn about strategies that facilitate different types of play and integrate numeracy learning into structured and non-structured play.
You will learn one of the three key communication techniques that are discussed in this course. Through this lecture, you will learn about the Questioning technique and examples of how you can use this technique to prompt a child for further numeracy learning and check a child’s understanding.
In this lecture, you will learn strategies to communicate with children so that quantities and numbers would become less abstract in their learning process. Using the technique, Make Thinking Visible, you will be able to engage children in numeracy learning by helping them experience quantities and numbers in multiple ways.
This lecture will provide you with various ways to support children’s learning process by using the technique of Positive Reinforcement. You will learn from concrete examples of how you should respond to children in different scenarios.
In this lecture, you will learn the three key principles of Universal Design for Learning. Using these principles of a guide, you will learn from concrete examples that allow children to learn numbers through multiple ways and to express themselves through multiple ways.
You will learn about the two kinds of thinking process that are involved when solving a problem. This lecture will focus on the thinking process that drives creativity and provide you with strategies to allow your child to be creative during numeracy learning.
Early childhood numeracy skills is the foundation for other skill sets that are involved in mathematics learning. In this lecture, you will learn about the other three areas that are important skill sets in mathematics learning during the years of formal schooling. You will also learn strategies to help your child develop these numeracy-related skills.
In this lecture, you will learn to facilitate numeracy development through storytelling. Catalyzing children's innate sense of wonder and curiosity when they are immersed into stories, stories become impactful contexts for numeracy development. Storybooks that have a math focus are excellent resources to build a foundation for future math skills. 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.
In this lecture, you will learn to create your own math toys made with simple crafts and household materials. You will learn to create your own math toys that helps children learn about adding to 10.
In this lecture, you will learn to create your own math toys made with simple crafts and household materials. You will learn to create your own math toys that helps children learn geometry.
In this lecture, you will learn to create your own math toys made with simple crafts and household materials. You will learn to create your own math toys that helps children learn and practice the fundamental operations.
In this lecture, you will learn to create your own math toys made with simple crafts and household materials. You will learn to create your own math toys that helps children learn about patterning and measurements.
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