Count Us In: Storytime Is a Perfect Occasion to Strengthen Children's Math Skills

At a recent statewide workshop, Laurie Danahy, a Head Start prekindergarten specialist for the Oregon Department of Education, urged librarians to “mathematize” their next storytime. Before you shriek, “I won’t add any more instruction to my storytime!” hear us out. Every time you promote children’s early literacy skills by talking, reading, rhyming, and singing during storytime, you’re promoting children’s early numeracy skills.

Think back to your last storytime. Did you form a diamond shape with your fingers while singing “like a diamond in the sky” from Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star? Did you chant Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed (Clarion, 1989) by Eileen Christelow or read The Doorbell Rang (HarperCollins, 1986) by Pat Hutchins? While it’s unlikely that you considered which math concepts you reinforced while reading or singing, you were doing just that—strengthening children’s ability to think mathematically.

Numeracy is the ability to think and express oneself effectively with numbers and mathematics. When most of us think of math, we think of adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing. But mathematical thinking begins long before children begin doing arithmetic in school. The foundation for higher-level mathematics is built in the early years. In fact, by age three, most children can identify a set of three without counting each item.

Math is all around us and everyone in the course of daily life uses it, including children. Mathematics includes patterns, shapes, symmetry, time, money, size, and mathematical thinking—reasoning, problem solving, estimating, predicting, matching, sorting, ordering, and communicating. Children begin very early to learn about these broad ideas associated with math. Most two-year-olds clearly understand the difference between half a cookie and a whole cookie or being first to play with the new toy or last to get a chance.

In 2002, the National Association for the Education of Young Children and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics jointly issued a position statement for teaching early childhood mathematics. They recommended an instructional approach consistent with the nature of children’s development and learning—experiential, meaningful, fun, and interactive. Of course, as with all learning, children need time to play with real objects and test their ideas to make math meaningful for them, but equally important is the dialogue to go with it. Children need oral language to help them learn about mathematics. Laurie proposed that librarians take advantage of the language-based learning opportunity that we all do regularly—storytime.

Then she showed us how easily a storytime can be mathematized. To begin with, many children’s books, songs, and action rhymes provide a meaningful context for learning math concepts, such as Ten Terrible Dinosaurs (Dutton, 1997) by Paul Strickland. But we can do more. Laurie offered the following suggestions: Pose mathematical questions. After reading Who Sank the Boat? (Putnam, 1990) by Pamela Allen, you may ask, “Who is the heaviest animal in the boat? Who is the lightest?” Use the language of mathematics, such as less, more, greater than, equal, compare, etc. To reinforce the concept of one-to-one correspondence, you may ask, “Do we have enough stickers for every child?” Help children see themselves as problem solvers. Problem solving is a thinking process used in all math learning. While reading Just a Little Bit (Houghton, 1993) by Ann Tompert, you may ask, “Why are Elephant and Mouse having this problem?” What could they do?” Many children enjoy the challenge of solving problems and will offer their suggestions. With so many options, you’ll get a chance to acknowledge another important message for math learning: there are so many ways to solve a problem—not just one. Laurie’s last point was our favorite: Do not think “math lesson”; think fun!