Teaching Math to Preschoolers
Do you wonder what your preschooler should work on before going to kindergarten? This post is part of a series on how to successfully teach your preschooler at home. Today we’re talking about math concepts. 
Here’s what your preschooler should work on in math before kindergarten:
Patterns and Relationships:
- Sorts by color, shape, and size
- Orders several objects based on one attribute
- Recognizes simple patterns and can duplicate them
A very easy way to teach sorting is with using apples. Check out this post on sorting and graphing apples.
Number Concepts
- Counts to 20
- Counts objects with meaning to 10 (one-to-one correspondence)
- Matches numerals
- Identifies by naming numerals 0-10
A great activity to help with identifying and ordering numbers is this balloon activity.
Using magnetic pom-poms practice one-to-one correspondence is easy and fun for little ones. This post includes a free PDF for you to use.
Geometry
- Identifies 4 shapes: circle, square, triangle, and rectagle
- Demonstrates concepts of directional concepts (up/down, right/left, high/low, over/under, in/out, behind/in, beside/between, front of, above/below, inside/outside, far/near)
This activity we did earlier this week focuses on learning three simple shapes.
Tommy the Triangle is also a fun activity!
Measurement
- Shows understanding of and uses comparative words (big/little, large/small, short/long, tall/short, slow/fast, few/many, empty/full, less/more)
We haven’t done any lessons on measurement yet, but I’m sure I’ll incorporate it into our activities.
Do you have any ideas on teaching math to preschoolers?
Love these ideas! We’ll have to try a few of them! Thanks for visiting the blog! We are actually in Des Moines also – our farm is Indianola, but right now we live in Des Moines. Your blog is so great! Hope to visit again soon! 🙂
Thank you! That is so fun. My husband’s family lives in Indianola on a farm!! Maybe they are neighbors?!
Great ideas here about the math skills preschoolers need! Thanks for sharing!
Thank you, Katie! I hope it is helpful for you!
Manipulatives! Some of the more popular ones we use in my preK classroom are the “sorting bears” unifix cubes (for counting, sorting, patterning), links, and more recently we have been using magnatiles for math (ex. how many little triangles make the big square).
I agree! Thank you for this suggestion. I used many manipulatives as a 4th grade teacher and loved them. Sorting bears is on my list of things to do with my oldest. I love the idea of magnatiles for math. Thanks again for your suggestions!
So many fun ideas for getting little ones excited about math. Just pinned!
Thank you, Vicky!
I like teaching graphs at an early age-it takes away the mystery aspect! Tommy Triangle looks fun definitely something to do with my little one.
Yes, I agree! Graphs really can be a lot of fun, especially when you start young. Thanks for your comment!
There are some really great ideas! Thanks for sharing at TGIF!
Thank you, Debbie!
Troy is going to be super advanced! These are the things we’re learning in Kindergarten! 🙂
Haha! I think he’s a smart little boy and he really loves learning. I don’t think everyone can master all of this before going to Kindergarten, but it’s a good goal. Hope you’re having a good day!
Hi, our kids aren’t kindergarten but did come out of school for home ed because of some special needs. So, we can steal some of your ideas! We teach numeracy all the time, we use adding and tables to work things out in the real world so that they can see the point of math. They are really proud of the skills they have and find being asked for that sort of help amazing.
I love the thing you have done with the graph, my daughter has a lot of trouble with abstract ideas until she has seen things a few times but then she suddenly has it and graphs we have been around and visited and left but she would benefit from such a concrete activity.
They learnt odds and evens by using house numbers in our street. ‘Is it in the 2x table, no! Odds!’ The local old ladies think my noisy kids are very funny. Come to think of it I think they learnt to count with house numbers and use them for currently working out how to say 117 as ‘one hundred and seventeen’ etc. I love when they self-teach things like that and they learn faster when they are doing it because they want to.
Thank you for sharing, Gina. That is great that you can be their teacher and teach them through every day learning! That is so neat! I love the idea of learning even and odd numbers through house numbers. I’ll have to do that with my kids! Thanks again for your comment.