"Talking math" with kidsDo you speak math with your kids?
Many of us feel completely comfortable talking about letters, words and
sentences with our children—reading to them at night, helping them
decode their own books, noting messages on street signs and billboards.
But speaking to them about numbers, fractions, and decimals? Not so
much. And yet studies show that “number talk” at home is a key predictor
of young children’s achievement in math once they get to school.
Research provides evidence that gender is also part of the equation:
Parents speak to their daughters about numbers far less than their sons.
A study published in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology
drew on a collection of recordings of mothers talking to their
toddlers, aged 20 to 27 months. Alicia Chang, a researcher at the
University of Delaware, and two coauthors determined that mothers spoke
to boys about number concepts twice as often as they spoke to girls.
Children this age are rapidly building their vocabularies, Chang notes,
and helping them become familiar with number words can
promote their interest in math later on.
That was made clear in another study, published in Developmental Psychology
in 2010, which also used recordings of parents talking to their
children to gauge how often number words were used (the kids in this
study were between the ages of 14 and 30 months). Psychologist Susan
Levine of the University of Chicago and her coauthors found huge
variation among the families studied: Some children were hearing their
parents speak only about two dozen number words a week, while others
were hearing such words about 1,800 times weekly.
The frequency of number talk in the children’s homes had a big impact on
how well the youngsters understood basic mathematical concepts such as
the cardinal number principle, which holds that the last number reached
when counting a set of objects determines the size of the set (“One,
two, three—three apples in the bowl!”). A subsequent study
by Levine found that the kind of number talk that most strongly
predicted later knowledge of numbers involved counting or labeling sets
of objects that are right there in front of parent and child–especially
large sets, containing between four and ten objects.
Though it may not come naturally at first, parents can develop the habit
of talking about numbers as often as they talk about letters and words.
Some simple ways to work numbers into the conversation:
• Note numbers on signs when you’re walking or driving with children:
speed limits and exit numbers, building addresses, sale prices in store
windows.
• Ask children to count how many toys they’re playing with, how many
books they’ve pulled out to read, or how many pieces of food are on
their plate.
• Use numbers when you refer to time, dates, and temperatures: how many
hours and minutes until bedtime, how many weeks and days until a
holiday, the high and low the weatherman predicts for that day.
• With older children, math can become a part of talking about sports,
science, history, video games, or whatever else they’re interested in.
With practice, parents and children alike will find that math makes a very satisfying second language.
