Math was not my strength. Seven years later, my sister came along, and math was not her strength. I married a man whose math was worse than mine, and we had a child.

She should have been doomed, but instead she is exploring multiplication and division on her own -- in first grade.

My sister gets the credit for this, indirectly, because one day when my daughter was a baby we happened to be discussing math and she said, "My mind just doesn't work that way."

I can't claim to have been an expert on infant brain development, but I knew enough about growth, babies, and brain science to know what it meant to her:

The way her mind worked was being formed right before our eyes. I was determined that she wasn't going to break out in a cold sweat when someone said "math" to her in later life. 

Toddler Learning Through Everyday Math

We never had a math lesson. I never quizzed her. Instead, I used fun family activities to keep her posted on the numbers as we moved through life.

I began by simply counting things in front of her. "How many do you have left? Let's see. One, two, three, four." I didn't have to ask her to count them back to me. She absorbed it at her own pace.

At 12 months, she counted to two, and would count her Cheerios that way, "One, two," then start a new set and count "One, two" again.

At 18 months, if she had a cracker on her high chair tray and she said, "More," I said, "Okay. You have one left, so I'll give you two more and then you'll have three. Three should be enough, don’t you think?"

By the time she was 2, we were dividing things up equally. When we sat down to play with her dollhouse, I'd put all six dolls on the floor in front of us and say, "Okay, we have six dolls, so you pick three and I'll pick three." 

Preschool Math Activities

I hoped to get her comfortable with numbers and "math thinking," but the results were greater than I could have expected.

Before she turned 3, she was doing simple addition and subtraction in her head and she didn't even know it was math. It was purely automatic for her. If someone said, "Can I have two of those?" when she had five to start with, she knew without trying that she would still have three left.

Math to her wasn't an academic subject -- it was something that was all around us. By the time my daughter started kindergarten, I could see that she would never be scared by it.

When her first grade class learned to count by twos and fives, she made the connection -- one that I'd never made -- to multiplication, and she began teaching herself to multiply.

Even so, I laughed when she asked me to teach her how to divide at age six. "It's too soon, honey," I told her. "You need to know your multiplication a little better." She let it go, but the next morning she asked me casually, "Did you know that six goes into 20 three times with two left over?"

"I did know that," I told her. "That's dividing. But how did you know?"

Very simply she said, "I saw my socks."

I went into her room and found twenty socks neatly laid out on the floor, centered on her Winnie-the-Pooh throw rug. They lay in three rows of six with two set off to the side, a perfect concrete representation of 20 divided by six.

By this time, she'd caught on to the fact that she was doing math, but she still didn't know it was work.

 

Tiffany L. Sanders is a non-practicing attorney and a mother.