5 Foundational Areas for Math Readiness in Preschoolers

There’s no doubt technology offers incredible learning opportunities! With a click of a button, you can tour the Smithsonian, explore a jungle in the Amazon, or interview a famous author. However, all the technological experiences in the world simply can’t replace the real-world, hands-on experiences that research has shown to be vital for helping students develop a strong foundation for early math and numeracy skills.  

By interacting with the physical world, students are “banking” experiences on which they can draw from later in life. In the good old days of roaming the neighborhoods until dark and drinking from the water hoses, we were essentially forced to interact with the physical world. We made our own fun for hours!  

With the advent of personal technology, even for kids as young as a few months old, entertainment is easily accessed through apps and videos instead of created or invented. This can result in some significant gaps in mathematical readiness as students prepare to enter the classroom. Fortunately, you don’t need fancy tools or toys to begin bridging these gaps for our littlest learners! 

Getting Students Ready for Numeracy Development 

Drawing from our research and extensive experience in early childhood classrooms, we've identified five key areas that signal a child's readiness for developing numeracy and math skills. Each of these foundational areas plays a significant role in a child's growth, yet nurturing these skills requires minimal effort and might even be considered fun! 

Oral Language Development 

Simply put: talk with your students constantly! Children have incredible potential to build their vocabulary and communication skills through meaningful conversations with adults. This can enhance their problem-solving abilities and conceptual thinking. Encouraging these interactions can unlock valuable opportunities for growth and development. Simple activities like counting days until a class party or specific school event or narrating daily routines can significantly enrich their oral language and mathematical understanding. 

Real-World Exploration 

Just take a second to look around you – the physical world provides infinite opportunities for discovery! In order to develop key skills such as spatial awareness, creativity, and problem-solving, provide plenty of time for open-ended play. Have little ones try building an original creation with a big pile of stacking bricks (instead of a step-by-step project), playing with rocks and sticks outside at recess, or simply zooming toy cars across the classroom or down the hallway. This type of unstructured play fosters a deeper kind of learning and self-discovery that will follow them through their entire academic career. 

Kinesthetic Development 

Movement and coordination are deeply tied to cognitive development, so let’s get up and move! Have a dance party or a skipping race! See who can balance on one leg the longest or who can do the most jumping jacks. Practice counting the number of steps to the classroom door or from the carpet to the student’s seat. Activities like skipping, balancing, and jumping are whole-body experiences, and help establish patterns and rhythms essential for understanding one-to-one correspondence and other mathematical concepts.  

Problem-Solving Skills 

In our culture of on-demand streaming, grocery delivery and YouTube “how-to’s”, we typically don’t have to struggle very often. Yet the ability to work through a problem, often through several rounds of trial and error, to arrive at a solution is vital for developing mathematical independence. It can be hard, even painful, to watch children struggle and figure out how to solve problems on their own, but it is also incredibly rewarding as they discover the world around them. Play-based activities like puzzles, board games, or role-playing encourage productive struggle and critical thinking. Resist the urge to solve problems for your student, and instead guide them as they grapple with challenges to arrive at their own solutions.  

Visual Memory 

We also don’t have to remember many things in today’s culture, thanks to our phones or tablets! Many children rely on digital images, which doesn’t require visualizing and remembering objects or patterns. Activities that challenge memory, like recalling objects on a tray or recreating patterns, can build this skill, which is crucial for math readiness. 

Real Objects Before Symbols 

Children’s ability to grasp symbolic math concepts—like numbers, equations, and patterns—depends on a solid foundation of experiences with real objects in the physical world, whether that object is a toy or game with which they are interacting or their own bodies that they learn to move through space. Only after thousands (yes, thousands!) of these types of experiences will students be ready to develop foundational numeracy skills that are essential for mathematical proficiency. 

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