Math Skill: Spatial Relationships

The girls had to go
around the chair,
over the couch,
under the coffee table.

Then they crawled
through the kitchen,
over the gate,
under another gate.

Then they jumped
down the hall,
into a basket,
out of a basket.

Finally they came to the playroom where they found cookies on a plate.

Sounds like a lot of fun, but what does this have to do with school?

When we started home schooling, I thought I would teach M & R the same level at the same time. One girl had just turned 5; the other was 3 1/2. Kindergarten for both would work out just fine. M & R both knew the alphabet, could both count to ten, and both recognized their shapes and colors. R likes to be just like her big sister, and sometimes we forget that she really is almost 2 years younger.

Our first attempt at math was to get kindergarten workbooks, and M flew through the book. However, R could not recognize her numbers, let alone draw them. Plus, she struggled with following directions because she did not understand what was expected of her. I realized then that R was her own person with her own educational needs. I could not lump her into M's lessons. So I went looking for a "non-paper oriented" math curriculum.

Knowledge is valuable, but it does not mean anything unless you understand what to do with the knowledge. You can recite the numbers 1 to 10, but that does not mean that you can count a group of toys. So I wanted games and activities that build the understanding before they build the knowledge.

I found Count on Math: Activities for Small Hands and Lively Minds, a book that builds many pre-math skills, and hundreds of simple, easy activities fill its pages. M & R could both do the projects and benefit, not even knowing that they were learning.

Each chapter covers a different skill and contains more than 30 activities for each skill. These skills include (but not limited to) the following:

• Exploration
• Spatial Relationships
• Classification
• Patterns
• One-to-One Correspondence (prepares for division)
• Ordering
• Numbers
• Shapes
• Adding
• Subtracting
• Telling Time

Order Count on Math: Activities for Small Hands and Lively Minds online now!