How to teach a child to count. Teaching children to count - free course from 4brain, training 9 lessons, Date November 29, 2023.
Miscellaneous / / December 01, 2023
Along with skills such as reading and writing, numeracy is very important. Despite this, many parents choose to focus their efforts on teaching their child other skills. However, we do not advise you to delay this, because early learning to count will serve your child in excellent service in the future.
We will give several arguments in favor of this, and at the same time answer the question: why does a child need to be able to count?
We can talk endlessly about the benefits of reading, but we will only point out the main reasons and advantages of teaching a child to count:
This list can be continued, but the point is that the development of numeracy is part of the full and harmonious development of a child’s personality. It is extremely important that when raising parents, they develop their child in different directions, and counting is one of them.
But how can you begin to develop your baby’s first numeracy skills? Are there any rules that need to be followed? We will present answers to these questions in the next block.
Unfortunately, there is no consensus on teaching children the science of counting. For example, the famous teacher, Doctor of Pedagogical Sciences and recognized specialist in preschool education Anna Mikhailovna Leushina believed that There is no need to rush too much when learning to count, and you should learn to count only after you have mastered the simplest operations on sets.
The fact is that counting is an activity that has its own specific characteristics, namely: purpose, means, methods of implementation and results, expressed in the form of a total number as an indicator of power multitudes.
The meaning of counting as an activity is to establish a one-to-one influence between the elements of a certain collections and numbers of the natural series as a standard set of numbers, where all these numbers reflect a certain class sets.
A huge amount of psychological and pedagogical research carried out at one time by such specialists as V. IN. Danilova, G. WITH. Kostyuk, A. M. Leushina and others showed that children begin to master counting gradually, and this process itself goes through a number of stages.
Children should always be taught to count through practical operations with sets, their division into components and comparison of adjacent sets. Accounting activities can be divided into the accounting stage and the total stage. Based on this, there is a correlated account and a final account. By correlated account, i.e. The process of counting, expressed in naming a number, is much easier for children to master, but the result of counting is more difficult to master.
Thus, A. M. Leushina identified six basic stages in the development of children's numeracy skills. The first two stages are considered preparatory. Going through them, children carry out operations with sets without using numbers. Quantity is estimated through the words “none”, “one”, “many”, as well as “more”, “less” and “equally”. In other words, the first two stages are pre-numerical stages, and the remaining four are numerical stages. Let's talk in more detail about each of the stages.
These are established by A. M. Letushina the main stages of teaching children to count. If you take this information into account and build the process of teaching your child to count, guided by it, the material will be absorbed much more efficiently, and the results will delight you and your child.
Now it’s worth talking about when you can directly begin practical actions, and which methods are most effective at each age.
As has already become clear, it is better not to rush into learning counting as such, but you still need to gradually prepare your child to master counting. Here's a system you can follow:
Remember that you need to teach counting exclusively in stages and systematically. In future lessons we will talk about methods of teaching counting in more detail. For now, our task is to understand the principle of future actions.
And to summarize the introductory lesson, we want to tell you how you can explain to a child what a number is.
The concept of number can easily be called the basis of counting and mathematics. But it, like any concept from the field of mathematics in general, is a kind of abstract category. For this reason, difficulties often arise when explaining to a child the essence of a number.
To make this easier, you can adopt a few good techniques:
In the second lesson you will learn the most common approaches to teaching counting, several exercises and the secrets of successful learning.
Lesson 1. The most common methods of teaching children to count
The ability to count makes the life of even an adult much easier, because it allows you to be more efficient at work, save time, and achieve better results. As for children, mental arithmetic skills are needed so that they can more successfully master the exact sciences when they study at school, and also competently operate with objects in the surrounding world.
As has already become clear, you need to think about how to teach your precious child to count long before the time comes when it’s time to go to first grade. It is precisely because of the need for appropriate teaching methods and the relevance of this issue that not only specialists in preschool education, but over the years, parents themselves, learning from their mistakes, have come up with various ways to teach count children.
Lesson 2. Advantages and disadvantages of basic methods of teaching children to count
In the second lesson we talked about the most common methods of teaching children to count. In the same lesson, we will examine in more detail the methods of Nikolai Zaitsev and Glen Doman that we mentioned earlier, Let's talk more specifically about finger counting and mental counting, and also point out the pros and cons of all of these ways.
We have already understood that the ability to count, together with the ability to read and write, belongs to the first stage in home education. It is likely that you have already tried your hand at teaching your child to count, and most likely, you have noticed that success can be achieved even without special didactic tools and teaching skills.
Lesson 3. Preparing for counting for little ones: tips, activities, games, books
Any child can be taught to count. The only question is how to do it. Despite the fact that counting (including quick calculations) is not seriously difficult, some children can do it almost in the blink of an eye, while others have difficulty understanding the information. Not knowing how to convey seemingly basic things to their baby, some parents resort to all sorts of tricks, while others give up altogether. In the matter of full education and personal development, neither one nor the other is completely suitable, and there is only one way out of the situation - to know how, when and what to do. This is what we will talk about.
Lesson 4. Learning numbers
Any teaching of counting and numbers should always begin with the acquisition of elementary quantitative concepts, such as “many”, “few”, “more”, “less”, “equally”, etc. And children easily understand them even in nursery age. Your main parental task is simply to help them do this. You can develop quantitative comparison skills in the process of everyday life. So, together with your baby you can compare the number of candies or sandwiches, flats on the landings and steps on the stairs, braids and bows for girls, etc. However, there is no need to tackle large groups of objects at once, because everything should start with small.
After mastering quantitative concepts, it’s time for the baby to get acquainted with the world of numbers. As you already know, this should happen in an interesting and exciting way for the child, for which the methods we discussed in the first lessons should be used.
Lesson 5. Principles of teaching numeracy. Count to 10, to 20 and to 100. Counting in a column
As soon as children reach the age of 2-3 years, it’s time to work with them on counting more seriously than just telling them what “little” and “many” are, and how much “2 + 2” is. This age period is characterized by maximum cognitive activity, and cognitive abilities reach their peak. That’s why the children themselves are distinguished by their curiosity and desire to learn something they couldn’t do before. As a result, the incoming information falls on fertile soil, and then begins to be actively used by children in their interaction with surrounding objects and people.
But when teaching a child to count, you should always keep in mind that some data may be somewhat problematic to assimilate. A child may, for example, miss some numbers from a number series or completely change their order. The reason for this is the selectivity of children's memory - for the most part, what aroused an emotional response in the mind, in particular interest, is retained in it. Therefore, training should be based on several fundamental principles that you definitely need to become familiar with.
Lesson 6. Learning the multiplication table
The numbers have been studied, the basic mathematical concepts have been mastered, the child can freely count to a hundred, add and subtract - all this indicates that it is time to start studying the multiplication table.
The multiplication table may be more difficult for a future student than the basics of mathematics, and as a parent interested in the development of your child, you are obliged to support him in this matter. As before, you will need a fair amount of patience and persistence.
Lesson 7. Troubleshooting math problems
In this lesson we will try to consider not so much problems with the technical side of mastering mathematical knowledge, but problems of a more global, one might say, psychological nature.
And there are several reasons for this. You will learn about them in this lesson.
Lesson 8. How to make a child fall in love with mathematics
You can endlessly study mathematics with your child, learn the multiplication table, solve hundreds of examples, but still never get him to begin to experience warm feelings for this subject. For many children, mathematics is not only a difficult subject, but also a very boring one. As a result, numbers, examples and problems are uninteresting to children and are given to them with great difficulty. In such cases, many parents come to the conclusion that their children have a humanitarian mindset, but are far from The reason always lies in the lack of ability to technical sciences and carry out all kinds of calculations.
As you know, the attitude towards something automatically affects the desire to deal with it. Remember yourself: how often does it happen that you don’t like something, as a result of which, even if you have to interact with it (do some things, solve some problems, communicate with specific people), you do not show any enthusiasm. The situation is exactly the same in the context of our topic. It is likely that a child’s failures in mathematics are due to the fact that he simply does not like it. And to correct the situation, you need to know ways by which you can instill in your child a love of mathematics. Remember that, first of all, your task as a parent-teacher is to convey to the child’s consciousness that mathematics can be interesting and useful, and in general one can enjoy it.
Lesson 9. The simplest mathematical techniques
Having considered the most important issues and the most time-consuming moments in the process of teaching children to count, we can now allow ourselves to relax a little. Today we will get acquainted with ten simple mathematical techniques that, firstly, will help you understand your child that mathematics is simple and interesting, and secondly, they will teach him to enjoy calculations. However, it will be useful for you, as parents, to refresh your memory of arithmetic knowledge and, perhaps, discover something new for yourself.
The math tricks below will improve your precious child's skills and speed up his mental math skills.
- Firstly, the presented section of our course is devoted to teaching counting to children mainly of preschool and primary school age.
- Secondly, many technical problems have already been discussed in the first lessons of this section, and we have given plenty information on how to avoid the most common mistakes that cause technical Problems.
- Thirdly, the psychological aspect is important because already at a young age it is possible to see whether the child is having difficulties with the assimilation of the material, does he feel a craving for mathematical knowledge, what does he gravitate towards more - humanitarian or exact knowledge? sciences
Next, we suggest you take a little break and get a charge of additional motivation to complete the course.