Children are Born Mathematicians: Supporting Mathematical Development, Birth to Age 8

This brand new book for Early Childhood Mathematics Methods classes takes a comprehensive and chronological view of mathematics development in children, beginning at birth and going through the third grade.  It offers specific teaching suggestions for each grade level based on the newly released NCTM (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics) standards.  The new NCTM focal points for each grade are designed to help make mathematics teaching coherent and focused.  Knowing what the two or three most important concepts are in each grade help teachers focus their teaching and their mathematics program.  Using these standards can help teachers to use many different methods to reach their objectives rather than being tied to one specific method. 

 

This book takes a constructivist approach, meaning that children should be active learners and interact with other children in learning and constructing their knowledge.  The author stresses that this process is at least as important as correct answers, as is comprehension of concepts.  Teachers should focus on questioning and promoting mathematical thinking rather than simply getting the correct answer.  Finally, the author encourages teachers to see math as a developmental process that children engage in as they grown and develop.  The teacher’s role is to promote concept understanding and development through active experiences and questioning techniques in combination with teaching skills in developmentally appropriate ways. 

Comprehensive yet accessible, Children Are Born Mathematicians is a constructivist and developmental approach to teaching mathematics to young children from birth through third grade. Foundational chapters on the state of mathematics today, theories of learning, and diverse learners provide the perspective that understanding of mathematics is developed individually as well as socially, and age-specific chapters explain how teachers can support and assess that learning.   

 

A Constructivist Approach. Geist wants prospective teachers to understand how children learn math, and devotes much of this book helping readers understand how to provide learning experiences that help children construct their own learning.

 

A Developmental Approach. Because knowing what to teach and when to introduce it is as important as knowing how to teach, the core chapters of this text break teaching math down into accessible parts, by age groups: infants and toddlers, preschool, kindergarten and first grade, and second and third grade.

Each age-group chapter has a consistent organization: brief developmental introduction, what concepts children naturally discover during that developmental range, NCTM concepts that children should be learning, assessment methods, and open-ended ideas and lesson plans to support those concepts. 

 

Incorporates NCTM Standards and Curriculum Focal Points. Standards discussions and Curriculum Focal Points are woven throughout the book. Students will learn what content to incorporate into lessons, see examples of lesson plans, and learn to implement standards-based, developmentally appropriate lessons in their classrooms.