How Playing at Child Care Will Build Your Child's Numeracy Skills
Sending your child to preschool is a great way to build up their foundations in numeracy, among other subjects. However, did you know that even a childcare or daycare centre with no formal teaching could help your child learn early math skills? That's because children naturally learn through playing and going to daycare with their peers is one of the best environments for educational play. Here are two ways that enrolling your child at a childcare centre will facilitate their pre-mathematics development.
It Develops Mathematical Language
Many people mistakenly think language skills only build a child's literacy understanding, but the truth is that language is important for every subject. After all, without using mathematical terminology in classes, how would teachers be able to educate a child on the subject to begin with? As your child plays with other children at their daycare centre, they'll passively develop their mathematical vocabulary. When your child tells their friend the car they're pushing is "heavy," or that they want to play with the "biggest" doll, they're not just having a playful conversation. They're developing their use and understanding of weight and size, both crucial concepts in mathematics. When children share out a collection of dolls and one child remarks that it's not "fair" or "equal" because the other person has "more," they're not just complaining. They're building that early vocabulary that will help them add, subtract, and compare later on.
It Gives Them More Toys to Learn From
Since daycare centres provide enough toys for all the children in attendance to use, your little one's childcare centre is likely to have a far bigger toy "library" than the one you have at home. Not only does this provide more fun, but it also provides more learning opportunities. For example, one way children learn to count faster and more accurately is by counting their toys. If your child has three cars at home, this will only help them count up to the number three. Their daycare, on the other hand, may have ten cars or more, giving them bigger counting opportunities. Having more toys at one's leisure can also help to build an understanding of shapes. When learning to recognise shapes, children need to see a lot of variation to understand what makes a circle a circle or a square a square. A child who has access to various balls, stacking rings, play foods like pizzas and oranges and other circular toys can quickly build a better understanding of how to recognise a circle.
