The Importance of Math in Elementary School

This week's article summary is Kindergarten Math is Often Too Basic, which bemoans the math curriculum in most schools.

As you read the article, note how different Trinity is in terms of what we teach in math, how we teach it, and what we expect of our students.

Even though we are not a standardized-test-drive school, our annual ERB results indicate strong student foundation in math skills and concepts.

Our overarching philosophy of teaching math is that conceptual understanding leads to automaticity and fluency, which is the opposite of most other schools that believe that skill and repetition will lead to conceptual understanding.

Activities like Number Talks, subitizing, and asking students to solve math problems in multiple ways help them see that math is fluid and multi-dimensional.

Thanks to the oversight and coordination of Jill and Kerry, Trinity’s math program from Early Learners through sixth grade enables our students to understand math at a deeper level.

With this strong foundation, they are truly set up to thrive in math after they leave Trinity!

Joe 

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Kindergarten may be math’s most important year — it lays the groundwork for understanding the relationship between number and quantity and helps develop number sense, and how numbers relate to each other.

But too often teachers spend that crucial year reinforcing basic information students may already know. Many kindergarteners learn early on how to count and recognize basic shapes — two areas that make up the majority of kindergarten math content. Though basic math content is crucial for students who begin school with little math knowledge, a growing body of research argues more comprehensive kindergarten math instruction that moves beyond counting could help more students become successful in math later on.

For a variety of reasons, kindergarten often misses the mark: math takes a backseat to literacy, teachers are often unprepared to teach it, and appropriate curriculum, if it exists at all, can be scattershot, overly repetitive — or both.

Deep thought is important, even in the earliest grades. Kindergarten math proficiency is especially predictive of future academic success. Students’ number competence in kindergarten — which includes the ability to understand number quantities, their relationships to each other, and the ability to join and separate sets of numbers, like 4 and 2 making 6 — presage mathematical achievement in later grades, with greater number competence leading to higher math achievement.

But the math content commonly found in kindergarten — such as counting the days on a calendar — is often embedded within a curriculum in which the teaching of mathematics is secondary to other learning goals. Learning experiences in which mathematics is a supplementary activity rather than the primary focus are less effective in building student math skills than if math is the main goal.

Breaking numbers apart and putting them back together and understanding how numbers relate to each other does more to help develop kindergarteners’ mathematical thinking than counting alone. Students should move from using concrete objects to model problems, to using representations of those objects and then to numbers in the abstract — like understanding that the number 3 is a symbol for three objects.

One reason for redundancy in kindergarten math may be that classrooms lack cohesive materials that progress students through skills in an orderly way. Only  36 percent of elementary schools use high-quality instructional materials.

Some worry that increasing time spent on academic subjects like math, and pushing kindergarten students beyond the basics of numbers and counting, will be viewed as unpleasant “work” that takes away from play-based learning and is just not appropriate for 5- and 6-year-olds, some of whom are still learning how to hold a pencil. Kindergarteners can be taught more advanced content and are ready to learn it. But it should be taught using practices shown to work for young children, including small group work, hands-on work with objects such as blocks that illustrate math concepts, and learning through play.

Mathematician John Mighton, the founder of the curriculum JUMP Math, said it’s a mistake to believe that evidence-based instructional practices must be laborious and dull to be effective. He has called on adults to think more like children to make more engaging math lessons.

“Children love repetition, exploring small variations on a theme and incrementally harder challenges much more than adults do,” he wrote — all practices supported by evidence to increase learning.

Simple lessons, when done well, can teach complex ideas and get children excited.

“People say kids don’t have the attention,” to learn more advanced concepts, he said, but he strongly believes that children have more math ability than adults give them credit for. Getting students working together, successfully tackling a series of challenges that build on each other, can create a kind of collective effervescence — a feeling of mutual energy and harmony that occurs when people work toward a common goal.