How do children learn the concept of numbers?
I am sure no parent needs to be told how important early development of mathematical skills is. It comes just after language skills in importance, which is why early learning always has reading, writing and arithmetic at its core. But when you think about it what are numbers? How do you convey the meaning of 1 or 2 or 10?
Children often tend to parrot things before they understand them. They tend to learn the ABCs before understanding about reading or writing words, often through songs that recite but don’t educate about what the alphabet actually is. And that is fine when put into use with other methods of learning the ABCs. More structured teaching of the ABC tends to contextualise the letters by also showing children an example word beginning with each letter and an image of the thing the word describes. So how do we achieve this with numbers? The simple answer is to show visual representations of what each number signifies and to show visual counting in action. Just as with the alphabet the children soon learn what numbers are by learning about counting things. And also, just as with the Alphabet, songs can help the process of learning about numbers. This is where video helps enormously as the capability to show counting and blend with both verbal and song form cues is enormously powerful.
We made these Little Wriggler videos to teach our son about numbers.
Soon he was counting so well he was able to help us make subsequent videos to showcase actual counting.
We also created counting games that blended cultural events with rewards for recognition of letters in order.
Once the basics of 1-10 were grasped and understood we went on to more complex counting concepts. Once children understand 1-10 and then expand to 20 the concept of counting to 100 and counting big numbers becomes accessible and far more quickly than one might imagine. Soon you child will sort of get the concept of infinity!
After that we were ready for actual mathematics, but that’s another story.
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