Young Children's Amazing Math: A Guide to Understanding and Supporting Early Learning

Explore young children's remarkable everyday math that can lay the groundwork for formal math education in kindergarten and beyond. Readers will learn how math is embedded in children's everyday lives, how daily routines contribute to the development of important math concepts, and what adults can do to foster the joy of early math learning. Ginsburg describes the development of children's informal ideas about number, shape, space, pattern, and measurement, and offers many specific activities designed to promote learning. This dynamic resource provides over 75 short videos showing individual children, from 9 months to 6 years, engaging in spontaneous everyday math activities or talking with an adult about their thinking. Fascinating and often funny, the videos help adults understand the child's everyday math so they can support meaningful math education. Readers and watchers of the videos are encouraged to think deeply about young children's everyday math and how they can foster it at home, in early learning programs, and at school. Everyday math can be fun for both children and adults. Enjoy it with the children!

Book Features:

• An examination of young children's everyday math, much of which is universal, despite differences across gender, socioeconomic status, and culture.
• An exploration of how understanding children's everyday math can lay the foundation for teaching school math.
• The first book to make extensive use of videos to tell "thinking stories" about young children engaged in everyday math.
• Videos will help adults, including early childhood education students, professional educators, and parents, to understand that math learning can be enjoyable and is not to be feared or avoided in the early years and beyond.
• Numerous activities that teachers, day care providers, and parents can use to promote the development of children's everyday math.
• Available in print with embedded QR codes for video access, as well as in a digital version.

Herbert P. Ginsburg is the Jacob H. Schiff Foundation Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University.