Designing playful and motivating math activities for young children that help them learn is challenging. It is particularly difficult to create activities that can be easily adapted to suit children’s diverse levels of understanding and skill.
Good news – help is on the way!
DREME’s eight Guided Small Group Activities offer a flexible and engaging way to help build important math competencies and, at the same time, develop the executive functions (EF: cognitive flexibility, goal-directed behavior, working memory, inhibitory control) that are important in both social and academic settings. The activities also strengthen children’s critical thinking, logic, and reasoning. They cover two key areas of preschool math: 1) numbers, counting, cardinality, and operations, and 2) geometry & spatial thinking.
We call them “guided” activities because teachers have an important role. In addition to setting up the materials (which are simple and included in the description on the website), they introduce the activity, explain the goal, demonstrate it with children, and then assist children in getting started. Teachers adjust the difficulty as children work on the activity and encourage them to explain their thinking. Most teachers first introduce the activity to the whole group and then engage children in small groups. Once the children are familiar with the activity, they can play it in pairs or small groups at center time.
The activities ensure that every child is working at a level that is developmentally appropriate for them by offering different degrees of difficulty for both math and EF and building in scaffolding for different skill levels. They also provide opportunities for collaboration so students can learn from and with each other, not just from their teacher. Such collaboration helps children develop social skills, such as waiting for a turn (which supports the development of inhibitory control). By working in groups, children can also see different ways to approach problems, reinforcing cognitive flexibility and diversifying their problem-solving strategies. They build communication skills by explaining their thought processes and asking each other questions
An important goal of the activities is promoting equity by allowing every child to participate in a meaningful way. For example, in the “What Shape Am I Touching?” children reach into a box and feel a shape without seeing it. They match the shape to one outside of the box (easiest), name the shape (intermediate), or describe the critical features of the shape so their friends can name it (most difficult). The teacher also adjusts the difficulty level by choosing familiar or less familiar shapes and one- or two-dimensional shapes. The demands on memory can be adjusted by providing children a card showing pictures of each step of the game (easier) or not (harder).
For the Magician’s Trick activity, 10 cards, each with a numeral from 1-10 are laid in a row, with the numerals face down. The first child points to a card, say the fourth one. The other child “secretly” counts the cards to “magically” declare that the target card is “4.” The first child turns it over to reveal that the magician is correct. The card is turned back face down and the children switch roles. The activity can be made easier by having the second child turn over each card as they count them, or using fewer cards (e.g., 1-5) or putting dots on the cards for children who don’t yet recognize numbers. It can be made more complicated by increasing the number of cards (e.g., to 20). To encourage children to count up or down rather than always starting from 1, any card turned over should stay face up. Then as they take turns, they are likely to use the more sophisticated counting forward or backward strategies. Adding a hat or wand or cape adds to the playfulness of the activity.
Children at any point in their math learning trajectory can enjoy participating in the same activity as their peers but be working at a level of difficulty that is just a little bit challenging for them – the level that will help them move to the next level. Additional small-group activities that can be easily adjusted can be found here.
These activities are not just for preschools. They are great for any setting in which a few children aged three to five years are gathered, including home childcare. Parents can also play these games with their children. The more places children encounter fun math activities, the more they learn.
