The document discusses the development of early mathematical concepts in young children. It explains that math skills like classification, seriation, number sense, and spatial reasoning emerge from concrete experiences with objects. These include sorting objects, ordering items, counting small quantities, and understanding spatial relationships. For math skills to develop, early childhood environments should provide opportunities for children to explore, compare, and manipulate a variety of materials through activities focused on patterning, measurement, and logical reasoning.

1. Prepared by:
Mrs. May-ridel P. Pasamata
MAED ECSD Instructor

2. • Adults often think of Mathematics as an
abstract discipline involving complex
algebraic formulas and geometric
calculations
• Yet, the foundation of math are grounded
in concrete experience such as:
• Exploration of objects
• Gradual understanding of their
properties and relationships

3. Cognitive Tasks

4. • Classification is the ability
to sort and group objects by
some common attribute or
property
• To classify, a child needs to
note similarities and
differences among objects
• Involves two simultaneous
processes:
1. Sorting
2. Grouping

8. • Concerns with the
relationship among objects
and the ability to place
them in a logical sequence
or order
• Sensory seriation include
ordering sounds from
loudest to softest, sweetest
to sourest
• Early childhood
environment should include
many materials and
experiences to encourage

19. • Number is an
understanding of quantity,
an awareness that entails
increasingly more complex
concepts
• Earliest forms of number
understanding:
• gross comparison of
quantity
• identifying more or less

20. One-to-one
Correspondenc
e

21. One-to-one
Correspondenc
e

22. One-to-one
Correspondenc
e

23. • One-to-one
Correspondence – A way in
which young preschoolers
begin to acquire an
understanding of number
concepts by matching items
to each other
• Rote counting – Reciting
Numbers from memory
without attaching meaning
to them in the context of
objects in a series

24. • Rational Counting –
distinguished from rote
counting in which the child
accurately attaches a
numeral name to a series of
objects being counted

25. • Concerned with the child’s
gradual awareness of time
as continuum
• Teach children the concept
of now, before and after
• Preschools’ experiences
sense of time are linked to
concrete experiences
• Temporal Sequencing –
ability to place a series of
events in order of
occurrence

28. • Cognitive ability involving
an understanding of how
objects and people occupy,
move in, and use space
• Learn vocabularies like,
behind, on top of, toward

31. • Young children are continually involved in
mathematical learning which early
childhood environment and teachers must
encourage
• Math for young children is not abstract, it is
the provision of many materials that invite
the child to handle, explore, compare,
measure, combine, take apart, reconstruct,
and transform in an infinite variety of ways

32. • By acting on materials, children actively
construct knowledge and gradually come
to understand mathematical principles
• Central to this gradual understanding is the
ability to conserve, recognize that objects
remain the same in amount or number
despite perceptual changes
• Preschoolers rely very much on their
perceptions

33. • This reliance on observable rather than on
internal understanding that materials do
not change unless something is added or
taken away is a characteristic in the
preoperational period
• It is through many experiences in
arranging and transforming materials that
children gradually move to the concrete
operational period in which they are able to
conserve

34. • Thus, preschool children are not conservers, but
they need to have plenty of concrete experiences
to acquire this ability in their elementary years
• The early childhood classroom should contain
many materials that lend themselves to acquiring
math concepts
• The class may also contain a specific math
center where materials designed to encourage
and enhance math concepts