The Best Way to Teach Maths to Preschoolers

Children begin developing mathematical skills as babies while exploring their environment, continuing into their preschool years.

By the time they are learning formal mathematical concepts in the first grade, the foundation for success has already been laid.

Here are some tips on teaching maths to preschoolers at school or at home by using hands-on activities and following a concrete-pictorial-abstract approach.

What are Early Maths Skills?

Early maths refers to the mathematical concepts and skills a child builds informally during the first few years. These are also called pre-maths skills or early numeracy skills.

It’s essential to develop these skills before introducing more advanced mathematical concepts.

When introducing children to maths, you may immediately think of numbers and start with counting, recognising numbers and adding or subtracting them.

While learning to count to 10 is fun for young kids, understanding the value of these numbers and what they represent is an advanced skill.

If you ask a young child to count five objects by touching each one, they might count the same object twice or skip some.

It’s important to first understand how children learn mathematical concepts and then help them develop early mathematical skills.

How Children Learn Maths: The Concrete Pictorial Abstract Approach

The three stages of learning any mathematical concept are concrete, pictorial, and abstract.

The Concrete Stage

In the concrete stage, children need to experience a concept physically. They develop an understanding of quantity by holding one block.

By playing with concrete objects, children grasp the concept that there can be one object, multiple objects, fewer objects, more objects, etc.

Many mathematical processes are going on while children build a tower of blocks or make mud cakes in the sand pit. They learn concepts like more, less, one more, not enough, how many, plenty, fewer, take away, and add on.

Children compare objects and learn that a value can be attached to objects.

The Pictorial Stage

In the pictorial stage, which follows the concrete stage, children can view pictures of objects and understand they represent real ones.

For example, a child can look at a picture and understand that the 4 leaves represent 4 actual leaves.

Later on, a child can see a dice with 4 dots on it and assign the value 4, knowing that the dots could hypothetically represent any object.

They would then be able to add the 4 dots on one die to the 3 dots on another and say there are 7 dots altogether.

The Abstract Stage

This is the final stage of understanding a mathematical concept. It means a child can see a sum, such as 4 + 3, written with symbols and add them without needing objects or pictures.

The child is mature enough to understand that the symbols 4 and 3 represent quantities to be added.

Are Preschoolers In the Concrete, Pictorial or Abstract Stage?

Preschoolers are mostly in the concrete stage.

In fact, up until the third or fourth grade, any competent teacher will still introduce new concepts concretely before using books or worksheets.

When children understand a concept concretely, it is then much easier to solve abstract problems.

In the preschool years, pushing a child to count pictures or understand number symbols is premature and may cause frustration.

You can expose children to numbers (e.g. playing with wooden numbers or magnetic number tiles) or rhymes that teach counting, without expecting them to understand the value of these numbers yet.

How to Teach Maths to Preschoolers: 15 Simple Activities

The best way to teach early childhood maths is through their primary medium of learning – play.

This means that during these early years, children don’t need formal lessons, activity sheets and workbooks. Maths for preschoolers should be all about fun.

Here is a list of a few basic everyday opportunities that double up as the perfect preschool maths activities.

1. Play With Shapes

Playing with foam or wooden shapes familiarises children with basic geometric shapes, as well as their properties. It teaches shape recognition.

2. Make Shape Pictures

Cut basic shapes out of coloured paper and make a picture out of them. Children learn to join 2D shapes together to make different forms.

Tangrams are another excellent tool for creating pictures using shapes.

3. Build Puzzles

Puzzles are excellent for developing visual perception and build a child’s understanding of geometry.

Choose good quality wooden puzzles with a wooden tray.

4. Play With Pegboards

Pegboards are another great activity for preschoolers to build maths skills. They develop number concepts and geometrical knowledge.

5. Build Forts

This may not seem like a maths activity, but building forts and other structures and climbing inside them is the first step in a child learning about space and shape. These early play sessions are a must.

6. Use Manipulatives

There are countless benefits of playing with blocks that children should have opportunities to play with blocks and all kinds of manipulatives daily.

Offer beads, counters, Lego and other construction toys.

Playing with blocks is an early step in building a concept of numbers.

7. Make Mud Pies

When children play in the sandpit and make mud pies and other structures, they begin to use terms such as “I need to make another one,” “There are 3 cakes” or “I made one for each of us.”

8. Learn Counting Songs

Singing counting songs is a fun way for a young child to learn to count forwards and backwards. This process is known as rote counting, which involves memorising sequences without necessarily understanding the values.

They also learn about increasing or decreasing quantity in songs such as Five Green Bottles.

9. Play With Numbers

Let your children play with foam, rubber, wooden or plastic numbers in the bath or on a magnetic board. Because they are physical objects, children can touch them and feel their shapes.

This is far more meaningful to a young child than looking at numbers on an activity page. With time, they will naturally learn to recognise them and know how they are formed.

10. Make Playdough Numbers

Playdough is one of the best substances out there, with some amazing benefits.

Get kids to mould the numbers out of playdough. This sensory activity will imprint the numbers in a child’s mind far quicker than trying to write the numbers on paper.

11. Play With Containers

Provide containers of different sizes and shapes and let your children discover the basics of capacity while having fun in the bath or sandpit.

Baking provides an excellent opportunity to learn mathematical concepts. Let your children be involved in measuring the ingredients to introduce them to units of measurement and quantities.

12. Measure Objects

Teach measurement by getting children to measure certain objects – such as a book, table or room – using body parts like hands or feet, and later objects, such as a block or book.

Children must first learn to measure length using non-standard items before they can be introduced to standard measurements.

13. Talk About Time

Find opportunities daily to talk about time. Use the daily routine as a starting point.

Discuss concepts of time such as the time of day (morning, afternoon) as well as clock time (“I’ll pick you up after story time, at 12 o’clock.”)

14. Play With Objects

Give kids different objects and ask them to feel which are heavy or light and to compare the weight of different objects.

Use a balancing scale (or make one) to compare the weights of various household items.

15. Problem Solve

Problem solving can be the most, um… problematic, of all the maths tasks! Children in the grades often struggle to visualize problems and what they mean.

They often resort to guessing operations (e.g. it says more so I should add) without having any idea what the problem is actually about and how, when visualized, the solution is usually so logical.

The best way to prepare children for problem solving is to give them non-stop opportunities to solve real problems.

You don’t necessarily need to be giving mathematical problems, just general problems that require training the brain to think, and think outside the box.

Allow many opportunities to:

• Build puzzles
• Solve brainteasers such as tangram puzzles
• Solve riddles
• Play games that require thinking
• Play with construction toys (e.g. figuring out how to make a bridge that doesn’t fall)
• Discuss problems and solutions during storytime
• Encourage children to find solutions to everyday problems.

As you can see, most play experiences have hidden opportunities for learning maths.

Learn to recognise them and use them to consciously teach certain skills. Remember to introduce new vocabulary and ask questions constantly during play.

Introduce words such as: heavier, lighter, longer, shorter, earlier, later, more, less, more than, less than, fewer, extra, not enough, altogether, left, another, full, empty, matching, same, different.

I hope this article has given you new ideas to try when teaching maths to preschoolers.