Everything you do should be able to be understood by your youngest audience. Everything you know can be taught to a three or four year old child; you’d be surprised how much a little child can learn. Of course foundations are mandatory - you can’t teach division without teaching multiplication, and you can’t teach multiplication without teaching addition, but there are no bounds to what you can teach. You just need to start.

We started teaching Henley math around 6 months old, and we used this really old method by Glenn Doman. We read his book, which you can find around old, used book stores, and sometimes you can find it online. His basic claim is that children need to learn about quantities before they learn to read numbers. What differentiates a 2 from a C or 4263 from the word FROG? To a baby or a young child, absolutely nothing. They’re both scribbly shapes that we write down. If we take that information and say, ok, reading is for words only, then how do we teach math? We teach quantities, or how much something looks like. In a most time consuming way, you take those little red sticky dots from some office-y store and stick them on cardstock. One dot on the first page. Two on the next. Ideally all the way up to 100 dots on the 100th page. Do the math, that’s 5050 dots and a lot of sore fingers, but you can make these over time. If you’re interested in this method for your babies, reach out to us and we can walk you through it, but for now, just know we started math really early in this really quirky way.

Fast forward until Henley was counting to 20 and beyond, and we finally started to introduce math on paper. Doman claims you can use this dot method for years, but it gets really difficult as a parent to keep up with the combinations and cards and I felt like I was staring at red dots for a year. When we introduced numbers on paper, it was just making sure there was an understanding of the written number (1, 2, etc.) next to a quantity. It went something like, “Here are the numbers 1 - 10 written out, count out beads and place the right number of beads on the right number”. There are a myriad of ways to play this game, too, and we will share early math secrets with you soon because the more ways your child can manipulate numbers, the more success in math they’ll have.

The next step was addition, followed closely by subtraction. We used a Montessori method here, so that when you write out each number, that number has the corresponding number of dots on it (see, our dot method was still in use years later!). Henley’s method for addition is to put the big number in her head - this usually consists of her putting her hand on her forehead and saying the number, then using her finger or a pencil to add up the dots on the remaining number. 8 + 3 = ? is “8 is in my head, 9, 10, 11.” We’ll teach this dot method specifically in another upcoming blog. Subtraction was the same except we needed to teach counting backwards from 20. If you can count backwards from 20, you can do any subtraction on paper. Also, years later, sometimes Henley still skips the number 10 when she’s counting backwards and I almost loose my mind every time :) We loved blocks for this, but we always made sure blocks were lined up with written numbers.

Then came the fun! Multiplication. We used stuffed animals, props, and clear verbiage. Before teaching multiplication math, you have to make sure the actual concept is clear; adding makes things bigger, multiplication makes things WAY bigger and WAY faster. That should do it! Then you get to tea parties. Set up any number of stuffed animals, and give each animal the same number of something (chocolate chips, paper clips, etc.), and say, “There are 3 animals. Each animal has 4 paper clips. How many paperclips do they have all together?” Then count them up one by one. This is purely conceptual. This can be done two times in 2 minutes or over a month, it doesn’t matter as long as your child understands that any number of “people” all have the same number of any object, and we need to know how many there are.

The next way to show multiplication is to set up the same stuffed animal experiment. 3 stuffed animals each have 5 buttons. You can count them up 5 + 5 + 5 = 15 or “I see 5, 3 TIMES” or 3 x 5! It’s a great way to start putting words to numbers and seeing how the word TIMES can actually be translated into a multiplication problem.

Translate this to paper with simple numbers. 2 x 4 = becomes “2 people each have 4 buttons, how many buttons do they have in total?” Feel free to solve the problem yourself so they can see there’s an answer, but don’t worry about you child knowing this material yet. Do as many examples as you want over a short period of time, making sure that your child can say the multiplication sentence. Have them set up stuffed animals and objects to show you their understanding.

Once you’re sure your child understands the meaning of multiplication, it’s time to teach the math behind the concept. We like starting as easy as possible.

Anything times 0 is 0.

Anything times 1 is the other number.

Then teach 10’s. It’s like counting by ones, but adding a zero each time. As long as your child can count to 100, they can count by tens. It’s just verbiage. At this point, you need to make sure your child can count past 100 because numbers are going to get big, fast! Counting to 1000, 10,000, 100,000, and 1,000,000 should be easy. Your child doesn’t need to be able to count every single number in between one hundred and one million, but there should be some knowledge of counting by 100’s to 1000, 1000’s to 10,000, 10,000 to 100,000, and so on. Once you can count to 10, you can count to 100, and once you can count to 100 by 10’s you can count to 1000 by 100’s. Your young child will surprise you at their ability to take in numbers faster than you can imagine.

After that, you should teach 2’s. We tried every method out there, from blocks to a number chart to beads, but the thing that worked best for all skip counting for us was singing. After Henley had some numbers memorized, it was great to reinforce what she was singing to blocks and beads and charts. Use any method you want, but stick to one! Our song was to the tune of “I Love You, You Love Me, We’re A Happy Family”.

Once Henley got her 2’s song, we covered the 5’s. These numbers are easy to remember, have great patterns, and can be seen in everyday life. The 5’s we clapped to and taught the basic pattern of numbers ending in 5-0-5-0-5-0 and so on. We referenced them on clocks and on our fingers and toes.

At this point you can teach 3’s, 4’s, and the rest of your single digit number songs. Pick tunes that your child knows and replace the words with numbers.

9’s are our favorite because there are so many patterns. And remember, you’re not teaching math on paper, you’re teaching the concept that 9+9+9 is the same as 9 x 3, so you don’t need more than a few songs that are great for memorizing. For 9’s, we taught the pattern of the tens place going up one every time and then units place going down every time. But, if you haven’t taught place value yet, just sing away!

Teaching place value should be taught around this time, and we’ll cover that in an advanced math blog.

The main lesson here is to teach math to your children! Teach it as early and as often as possible. Once your child can count to 20, you can teach addition and subtraction, and once your child can add and subtract, you can teach multiplication. As for a basic timeline, from learning to count to 20 to multiplying through 10’s can be done in a year. You might find that some of these concepts come really fast and extremely easily, and some are slower, and that’s okay. We’ve learned and now teach not to dwell on sticking points. If understanding multiplication with stuffed animals is tough, but your child can remember ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ with 2’s, then go ahead and teach that. The more you talk about math, the more your child will learn.

Teaching Math, 6 Months - 4 Years, an Overview