Recent research tells us that young children are naturally curious about math in the world around them. Preschoolers love to learn by doing — engaging their minds, connecting with their senses, and tapping into their enthusiasm. Research reinforces the value of letting them learn about math through hands-on games and activities they enjoy.

One surprising research finding is that, while young children appear to learn to read best by mastering skills in an orderly, linear fashion (e.g., print awareness first, then phonics, etc.), the “normal” learning curve in math can vary from one child to the next.

In fact, some children seem to be able to understand and engage in certain math activities without first having mastered other, simpler counting and math-related tasks. Since we have been learning about the number 3, your little one participated in an activity designed to strengthen their understanding of it.

We learned about the waltz, and how it is composed of the beats 1-2-3. With a partner, your little ones practiced chanting “1,2,3” as they danced around the room to the Blue Danube Waltz.

A loom is a tool used in weaving to help knit threads together to make a single piece of cloth. Loom technology is ancient, dating back at least to ancient Greek society. Since the invention of mechanized looms, large scale fabric production has become much more common.

With a little creativity, the loom serves several developmental purposes for the preschool child. Using pipe cleaners adjusted into the shape of a circle, your little one sorted and created patterns on their looms. This taught your little ones important skills like focusing on a task and following directions.

And planning color combinations and deciding how to use them in different patterns also stimulated creativity. This goes along with persistence, and it’s an important skill for young children to have as they enter their school-age years.

As children learn, they will rarely succeed the first time, and will need to be patient to keep trying again. Not becoming frustrated and knowing how to work through setbacks–which can definitely happen as learn how to make different and more complicated patterns on the loom–is an important skill for preschoolers to develop.

Putting all those tiny pipe cleaners together also requires some good fine-motor coordination.  What will something look like when it’s created using a pattern? How does an object or a shape appear when it’s turned upside down, sideways, and rotated? When working with the loom, students developed all these skills as they created the patterns they wanted to make. And being able to visualize things is an important skill in math, which makes the loom a deceptively fun math-related activity.

Preschool shape activities help your child develop early math skills.

Although recognizing objects as red or blue, round or square might seem like child’s play, it’s actually integral to a young child’s cognitive development, and sets the stage for math concepts from sorting and patterning to geometry, and beyond!

For this activity, we used a variety of objects, such as blocks, legos, plates, jewels, and beads in a sorting activity. Sorting is a beginning math skill. It may seem that a big chunk early math is about learning numbers and quantity, but there’s much more to it. By sorting, children understand that things are alike and different as well as that they can belong and be organized into certain groups.

Getting practice with sorting at an early age is important for numerical concepts and grouping numbers and sets when they’re older. This type of thinking starts them on the path of applying logical thinking to objects, mathematical concepts and every day life in general.

Studies have even been shown that kids who are used to comparing and contrasting do better in mathematics later on.