Baby Math: Teaching Counting and Geometry with Books

I spend so much time working on letters and prereading skills with my baby bookworm, that I've realized I often ignore another fundamental skill - counting and mathematics.  Apparently I'm not alone though.  According to one of my all-time favorite parent books, Baby Minds by Linda Acredolo and Susan Goodwyn (if you have a child under 3, get this book!), part of the reason that American children lag so far behind other countries in mathematics (namely Japan and China) has a lot to do with culture, environment, and most importantly, how parents "teach" children about math.  In a nutshell, Asian parents place more emphasis on math, do more day-to-day activities that involve math, and believe that their children are more capable of mathematical skills at a younger age.  So maybe we (Americans) can stop blaming the educational system and take a look at what we do with our children at a young age.  I am a firm believer that experiences, and especially early experiences, matter.  The authors of Baby Minds outline lots of fun activities that you can do with your child to help not only their arithmetic but also spacial-temporal abilities (yes, like baby geometry skills).  But, my blog isn't about baby games, it's about learning through books.  Here's some books that I'm using with my baby bookworm to help both of these abilities.  I don't want to fall into the category of American parents who ignore or under represent these important skills!

123 Philadelphia - A Cool Counting Book
by Puck and illustrated by Kevin Sommers

There's no dialogue here.  Just a book of "cool" Philadelphia things to count.  There are many, many, many counting books similar to this one in format (take Olivia Counts for example), but it's just one we happen to have on our bookshelf.  With my baby bookworm I use this book to reinforce the counting concepts of one-to-one correspondence (the notion that each item has it's own counting label), the cardinality rule (the name of last item we count represents the quantity of the entire set of items), and the flexible application rule (that no matter what objects we're looking at, whether it's Philly pretzels or colonial hats, we count them in the same way, using the same counting words). 


Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes
by Mem Fox and illustrated Helen Oxenbury

I love, love this book.  It shows how every baby, even though they are all born in different places, has 10 little fingers and 10 little toes.  It's very fun to count our own fingers and our own toes together, and I often say things like: There are 5 fingers on this hand, and 5 fingers on this hand, they are the "same".  Or, let's count all of our fingers and toes....and then we count to 20. With older kids it might be fun to try some addition here, or to count by 5's! 

Balancing Act
by Ellen Stoll Walsh

This is a cute book about two mice on a seesaw, and as some other friends come along they are either out of balance or balanced ("ta-da" as the books says).  What I like to do with this book is talk about the concepts more, less, and the same.  These words are not in the book, but you'll catch on once you read it.  It's short and to the point, so a great book for babies and toddlers.  You can also do a similar lesson with other books using concepts like bigger and smaller (might I suggest Curious George Bigger and Smaller).

Soft, Fluffy, Playful, Puppies

Yes, so here we are at geometry for babies.  There are lots of things you can do to facilitate your child's spatial-temporal skills.  Nesting blocks are great, as are shape sorters, and of course puzzles!  Baby bookworm has this really cute book about puppies and the puppies come out as puzzle pieces.  I'm sure there are other books with a similar idea.  Be sure to give your baby bookworm time to try to solve the puzzle himself! 

Baby Bookworm's shape sorter

Baby bookworms nesting blocks

Books that have a pattern for a child to figure out would also fall into this category, although I couldn't think of any, so let me know if you have one in mind.  And, of course, so would kid cook books - the mathematical lessons are endless here.  I can't wait to be able to cook with my bookworm.

Have fun!  I hope you find some baby math of your own in your favorite books!

Going on a Bear Hunt: Read and Reenact to Build Gross Motor Skills

Baby bookworm and I not only check out books from the library, but also lots of CDs.  As having a baby gives me an excuse to relive my childhood, at some point in time I had checked out a classic version (i.e., 70s or 80s) of Sesame Street songs.  Not really to my surprise, baby bookworm took to these songs, despite their being decades old.  Recently, though, after listening to a song on this CD sung by Grover called Over, Under, Around, and Through....I thought, wow, that reminds me of that book We're Going On A Bear Hunt  (I'm constantly looking for inspiration and connections from our daily lives that I can reinforce through books). I can CLEARLY remember sitting at circle time chanting We're Going On A Bear Hunt in my first grade class with my teacher, Miss Custer.  So at this week's trip to the library, I decided to revisit this fun, chanty, sing-a-long kind of story with an element of excitement.  My learning agenda with this book was threefold: I could reinforce those prepositional words from Grover's song (i.e., enhance vocabulary/comprehension), further develop her gross motor skills in a fun way by recreating our own bear hunt, and teach her about onomatopoeic words. So, alas, here we are going on a bear hunt....and he's our learning experience.

Of course, as I have mentioned in my Read Aloud Tips, I always read the book through at least once with no learning agenda so that I don't disrupt the flow of the book and baby bookworm can get acquainted with the story and characters.  I tried the first and third objectives below on the second read through.  The second objective was more of a reenactment of the story and I didn't try to "read" the book at the same time....we did it from memory. 

1) Comprehension/Vocabulary - The words over, under, and through are used frequently throughout the story because the story line is repetitive in nature (which makes this a great book for infants, toddlers, and school-aged children).  Rather than just reading these words, I specifically pointed them out to my baby bookworm.  So, for instance, in the story when they get to the river and say, "we can't go OVER it"...I put real emphasis on the word OVER and asked her to repeat it (she's really getting the hang of this talking thing).  Then I basically had a conversation with myself (using some dialogic reading techniques), "how would they go OVER the river?" "When do we go OVER rivers? How?" Then I did the same sort of thing with under and through...

2). Gross Motor Skills - Let's face it, most people (and kids) learn by doing.  Learning theorists such as Piaget and Vygotsky have long suggested that taking an active, rather than passive, role in learning is critical to the process of acquiring new knowledge (this is known as a constructivist view of learning).  So, I decided to act out the story with my baby bookworm so that she would actually be going OVER, UNDER, and THROUGH....  I got my inspiration for this activity from a great book called Read! Move! Learn! Active Stories for Active Learning by Carol Totsky Hammett and Nicki Collins Geigert.  Baby bookworm and I created a river (which was really her bathtub filled with water and a toy fish and crab), a snowstorm (which was really bubbles), we pretended we came across mud and took our shoes and socks off to go THROUGH the mud, a cave (made out of a dark basket with a bear, of course), and then we climbed UNDER our covers like in the book, to get away from the bear.  This is just what I had around, but use your own imagination to create a bear hunt that caters to your child.  She had lots of fun climbing over, under, and through (while at the same time enhancing motor skills).

Our "river"

Our "cave" and bear

Back to safety under the covers like in the picture in the book (shown below)

From some Baby Einstein flashcards we have....it has great information about bears we read on the back of the card

3). Onomatopoeic words - Each time the characters in this book go THROUGH something (like the river) it makes a fun sound (e.g., splash, splosh!).  Baby bookworm and I had a blast saying these words, and they helped her to learn about letter blends in words. 

I hope you all "catch a big one"!

Library "Daze" - Spring and other things

So today was baby bookworm's first day of toddler story time.  It actually ended up being fairly similar to the baby story time she was used to: 2 books, nursey rhymes and songs, followed by a play and socialization session.  The main exception was that the room was packed!  But, it was the first session for the Spring so my guess is that it won't be quite as crowded every other week.  One of the books that was read today was one that baby bookworm particiularly enjoyed because the mouse charater was one she recognized from a book we have at home. "Mouse" is the star in a series of books, including Mouse's First Spring which was read today. This is a great series to help your child build comprehension and vocabulary because you can introduce a bunch of topics such as: Christmas, Fall, School, Halloween, Valentine's Day, Snow, Summer....and the list goes on.  They are mostly, if not all, titled "Mouse's First....".  We have Mouse's First Halloween and ironically we read it this morning before story time.  It's a big favorite (gosh, I feel like I say that often though!).  We read it at least a hundred times at Halloween, but I'm always pleased to see how much baby bookworm remembers from a book that we haven't read in awhile.

After story time we perused the bookshelves as usual, and walked away with 5 books:

1). My Beak, Your Beak
by Melanie Walsh
copyright 2002

This is a good book for babies and toddlers with lots of bright colors and few words.  I picked it because we had read another book by this author called My Nose, Your Nose that baby bookworm enjoyed.  So far with one read through under our belt, this book has not disappointed and captivated my little one's attention from cover to cover.

2). Let's Go to Sleep! (part of the Good Habits with Coco and Tula series)
written and illustrated by Patricia Geis
copyright 2010

This is a board book that my bookworm picked out, but hey, I'm not going to argue with "Let's Go to Sleep!"  There are several other titles in this series that would seem to be very useful to a parent with a toddler: Good-bye Diaper, Good-bye Pacifier (hmmm...this might be our next read), Let's Help, Let's Get Well, Let's Get Dressed, Let's Wash Up, and Let's Eat.

3). Earrings!
by Judith Viorst and illustrated by Nola Langner Malone
copyright 1990

Judith Viorst is a popular children's book author and most famously, I believe, known for the book in #4.  This book appealed to me because baby bookworm is fascinated with my earrings (she can now say earring sorta successfully), and I really would love to get her ears pierced soon.  The book just seemed fun.  Thus far we've read about half...it is long, and probably a book for an elementary school child.  I think if I put enough expression into the story though I may be able to get my bookworm more interested.  If not, oh well, at least I enjoyed it!

4). Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
by Judith Viorst and illustrated by Ray Cruz
copyright 1972

I selfishly picked this book because it's one of my all-time favorites.  It just gives me a very nostalgic feeling.  Pretty much no chance baby bookworm will sit still for it, but maybe, just maybe if she hears bits and pieces of it from time to time she'll grow to love it too.  Once she hits preschool I bet it will be one of her favorites. 

5). Awesome Book of Thanks!
by Dallas Clayton
copyright 2010

I am trying to get baby bookworm to learn some manners.  You know, her pleases, and thank yous.  So this book seemed perfect, and it looked pretty brand new (I love discovering new gems).  Well, we read this book once so far, and I LOVE it.  Pictures are colorful and lively.  It is very long, but it does rhyme and therefore has a sing-songiness that my bookworm likes.  The book is published by Amazon Encore, and the author is the creator of The Awesome World Foundation which donates books to kids in need (OK, that's pretty awesome).  Shouldn't everyone be trying to make this world a better place?  You go Dallas Clayton, thank you.  Can't wait to check out: veryawesomeworld.com. 

One added bonus to the toddler story time today was some literature for parents on literacy and phonemic awareness, and I REALLY liked one article in particular titled: "Why Children Master Using Words When They Do" by Lauran Neergaard.  According to this article professor Bob McMurrary believes that talking and reading to a child is the key to boosting language and vocabulary in children, not necessarily some brain mechanism that is suddenly triggered.  He states in the article, "Children are soaking up everything...you might use serendipity to a child. It will take that child maybe hundreds of exposures, or thousands, to learn what serendipity means.  So why not start early?"  My sentiments exactly!