Mathematical Concepts: quantity, size, direction

Let me preface this by saying that I suck at maths. No really. I managed to drag myself along by the skin of my teeth to a level where I could cope with undergraduate level physics, but it was one hard journey and I struggled every stage of the way.

Confession: I still can't do long division. Or most of my times tables. Or anything but the most simple mental arithmetic. And yeah, it really does mean I struggle sometimes with the day to day stuff of my life.

So when it comes to helping Audrey learn about maths, I've turned the entire thing over to Ian. We talk about it, we both do research on it, but he's ultimately the one directing what we do. He's still looking into exactly what direction we're going to go in, because there are a bunch of ways to learn about various mathematical concepts, and I imagine the end result will be a mix of a few different approaches that fit for us.

We've been working more on sensory play and sorting. Look how hard she concentrates!

I've already been trying to teach Audrey about direction and size, but only today realised that they could easily be grouped into the area of maths.

We learn lots of useful vocab and ideas. Audrey goes "up" and "down" on the stairs, she climbs "up" onto things and jumps "down". She knows these words and has a basic understanding of what they mean. She says "hup" and "owwwwn".

We look at things which are smaller and things which are bigger. Audrey loves the marbles we play with, and we have bigger marbles and smaller ones. I ask her to show me the biggest marble. I hold up two and say which one is smaller? I do the same with the toy rats and mice - they look the same, but some are BIGGER.

Today, following a suggestion from Ian, we worked on an exercise on quantity. On two identical plates I put piles of same-sized marbles. On one plate there was just two marbles, on the other a whole handful. I pointed to them slowly and said "more" - "less" (Ian wants me to point out that we're using less rather than fewer as it's much easier for Audrey to say, even though not as grammatically sound). After pointing a few times, I got Audrey to point to the plate with more marbles. Then the one with less. She got that after a few tries, and I could tell she was really thinking about it.

Then I moved things around, so that there were more marbles on the plate that had previously had less. She was now a little confused, and soon got distracted by playing with moving the marbles from plate to plate. I think in future I would use something she's a bit less interested in for this exercise!

We're going to practice these things a lot. I have ideas to use different quantities of water as well, and to put different quantities of things into sealed jars and work up to her ordering them from least to most.

Quantity is a great introduction to counting as a real tool to show how much of something there is, rather than as an abstract idea or just a series or words like a nursery rhyme (1-2-3-4-5).

The best part is, we're all having so much fun.