Math is taking on new shapes in Rowland Hall’s Beginning School. It’s also taking on new sets, patterns, measurements, and analysis.

As part of the ever-innovating curriculum, teachers have begun implementing practices from the Erikson Institute’s Big Ideas in Early Mathematics to help students move beyond the basics and start seeing math everywhere.

“With children this young, it would be easy to relegate math to counting, but they can learn and understand so much more,” said 3PreK lead teacher Liz Ellison. “We are building a math foundation incorporating multiple concepts that will help them take on big math moves with ease later on.”

With children this young, it would be easy to relegate math to counting, but they can learn and understand so much more.—Liz Ellison, 3PreK lead teacher

The big ideas laid out by the Erikson Institute’s Early Math Collaborative, a space to share resources that increase the quality of early math education, give young children a deeper understanding of math by doing less rote memorization and more exploration of foundational math concepts like spatial awareness, pattern recognition, and number sense. Melinda Canfield, 3PreK assistant teacher, was introduced to this curriculum during a professional development workshop and instantly knew it was perfect for Rowland Hall.

“We were already teaching these lessons to our students, but this is a different way for them to experience math and really put it into their bodies,” she said. “As teachers, we formed a book club to discuss how to explore and implement these ideas in our classrooms.”

Some of these ideas included a delightful tea party on a recent spring day in Liz’s class, where students explored number recognition by selecting amounts of sugar to add to the tea, building sets by matching their ingredients to those of the other children, and counting as they placed cookies by their classmates’ cups. Over in Mara Kushner’s 4PreK classroom, kids were listening to a story about ladybugs and doing addition and subtraction as their ladybugs (glass beads) landed on imaginary leaves and then took flight once more. Other lessons have included graphing the number of letters in students’ names, mapping the journey taken by characters in the book Rosie’s Walk, and measuring the length of a sunflower bloom and then determining the height of each student in sunflowers.

“By relating math to the lives of the students, or a story or something fun, it makes it easier to remember and understand,” Mara said. “And as a teacher, it gives me new ways to think about math differently and find ways to incorporate it into the classroom.”

The very nature of young children is at the heart of how they are learning math in these lessons. At this stage of development, there is an innate desire to share and cooperate. That collaborative impulse helps them support each other during lessons and deepens their learning.

“In one lesson, we gave the students dice to practice subitizing (the ability to instantly recognize numbers),” said Mara. “Some students were able to recognize the dot patterns quickly because they had prior experience playing dice games, and they naturally began helping their peers who were still learning by showing them how to ‘see’ and count the dots more efficiently.”

I don’t want to quiz children for assessment. Instead, I want to observe what children are doing naturally in their play and across different contexts. Observing children across real activities gives a much more nuanced picture of what they have truly internalized.—Melinda Canfield, 3PreK assistant teacher

Exploring this type of teaching has not only changed how lessons are presented in the classroom, but also how the students are assessed on their cognition. Since the children are learning such a broad range of mathematical concepts across the entire curriculum, the teachers are looking at them in different ways, determining how concepts are taken in and processed, and the best ways to help them move forward and deepen their knowledge.

“I don’t want to quiz children for assessment,” said Melinda. “Instead, I want to observe what children are doing naturally in their play and across different contexts. Observing children across real activities gives a much more nuanced picture of what they have truly internalized.”

The math learning doesn’t stop at the classroom door. Parents are being encouraged to take these math methods into their homes to continue the lessons there. The teachers have been creating activities that can be done easily and placing the information on the Seesaw platform. This isn’t homework; it’s an expansion of the concept that math is everywhere.

“We’ve given them activities where they count the use of an item across different days and then chart those items and determine which day saw the most usage. It’s an activity that we did in the classroom with paper towels, and it was easy to move to the home,” said Liz. “And then there are other activities like listening to music as a family and finding the beat, or identifying counting concepts when cooking together.”

Math is a skill that these children are going to have to use their entire lives in one way or another. That’s why it is so important to their teachers that, early on, it becomes a tool easily integrated into their lives, ready to be used later on in bigger and better ways. The use of the big ideas from the Erikson Institute is allowing them to do just that.

“Wrestling with simple math concepts now lays the foundation for more complex math later,” said Liz. “Math is most meaningful when it’s woven into everyday experiences, especially through play, and not through flashcards or rote quizzing.”

Ultimately, whether they are counting dots on a die or pouring tea for a friend, those moments of play are the building blocks for a lifetime of mathematical fluency. At Rowland Hall, teachers evolve and learn alongside their students to constantly shift the shapes of instruction and ensure that the joy of discovering math today becomes the mastery of it tomorrow.