Wondermaths Guide · 38 articles
Writing a number and knowing what it means are two different skills. Most kids get the first one first, and the gap between them is normal at 3, 4, and 5. If your child can write a 5 but can’t hand you five blocks, nothing has gone wrong. She learned the shape. The meaning comes … Read more
When a child says I can’t before touching anything, the counting is usually not what stopped her. The task looks too big to start. One thing that helps is making the first step smaller than the thing she is refusing, and then making it smaller again. Ten objects on a page is a wall. Three … Read more
Put four large stones next to six small buttons and ask a four-year-old which group has more. Most will point at the stones. They are not guessing. They are answering the question they heard, which is closer to which one is bigger, and the stones win that one easily. Many four-year-olds do this. It fades … Read more
It is the second week of August, the school supply list is on the counter, and someone at the playground just asked whether your five-year-old can count to a hundred yet. So you go home and you try it. She gets to twenty-nine, says “twenty-ten,” laughs, and runs off. Nothing is wrong. But the number … Read more
You lay out the blocks, you count them together, and then you ask the question every parent asks. How many? And she shuts down. Or shrugs. Or says a number she clearly does not believe, watching your face to see whether it was the right one. Children can tell when you already know the answer … Read more
One, two, three, five, six. Every time. Four never shows up, and by the fourth day of hearing it you want to stop her and fix it. Don’t. Not because correcting is unkind, but because it is aimed at the wrong thing. The number list starts life as a song To a three-year-old, one to … Read more
Most of us measure counting by the number our child reaches. It is the easiest thing to hear and the least useful thing to know. A child who counts to thirty and a child who counts to seven can be in exactly the same place, or twenty steps apart. The number does not tell you … Read more
A walk is the one place where counting costs nothing extra. You were going anyway, the objects are already spaced out, and nobody has to sit down. Why walking counts differently Two things happen on a sidewalk that don’t happen at a table. The objects are spread out, so the child has to move to … Read more
Every page we make is built for a three-year-old who cannot read yet. It sounds like a small constraint. It turned out to decide almost everything else. No text on any page a child touches If a page needs reading, then a child who can’t read yet needs an adult to unlock it, and the … Read more
Worksheets get a bad name they don’t quite deserve. The problem isn’t that they’re harmful. It’s that they teach something different from what we think they teach, and at three and four that difference matters. What a worksheet actually asks for Look at what has to happen for a child to complete one row. They … Read more
This takes one stick of chalk and about four minutes to set up, and it is the single most useful thing on this site for a three- or four-year-old. Why chalk and not paper On paper, five circles sit inside a hand’s width of each other. On the ground, they’re spread across six feet, and … Read more
A child who can rattle off one to twenty sounds like a child who can count. Often they are — and just as often, the two things have come apart, and the recital is running well ahead of the understanding underneath it. This is not a problem to fix. It’s a normal stage, and it’s … Read more