Family literacy facilitators realize that reading with your child involves more than speaking the words that are written in the book—the child perceives the story, and the warmth in the parent’s voice, and the security of sitting in the parent’s arms, as part of the experience that we call “reading.” Pound, speaking of conversations, rhymes, and songs, says:
The words in isolation are not fully comprehensible to the infant, but within the context of interaction between adult and child they create sensations of belonging, communicating, anticipating, predicting and enjoying which will form the basis of all future learning (Pound, 2006, p.6).
Math play also creates those same sensations. A child who is getting out forks for every family member for supper experiences a sense of belonging, contributing to family life, responsibility and so on. The math is the same as the math on a worksheet that shows her a group of dogs and a group of dog houses and asks her to draw a line between each dog and a separate house, but the feeling is different, and the learning is different.
It is important to start with what the kid is concerned with (persistent concerns) and use them to encourage math play (Pound, 2006, p 21). The thesis of Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff’s book is that children learn in context rather than through flashcards or worksheets, and the authors note that spending the money that he first earned is a lesson in addition and subtraction that sinks in quicker and more deeply than any artificial situation.
There are many descriptions of the developmental stages in the literature; the following are generally accepted, and are based on the outline from Pound’s book, Supporting Mathematical Development in the Early Years (2006). Learning about these ages and stages allows parents to understand some of the child’s inner development, which is often different than what appears on the surface. For example, a child who is learning to say “one, two, three…” (starting about age 3) is really only learning by rote, and may well make “mistakes”, for example, may say the numbers in the “wrong” order or, when counting a group of five items may start at 3, or miss some items, or count some items twice. It is later that he learns one-to-one correspondence (i.e., that each number corresponds to just one item, and every item has an associated number) and later still that he understands that when you count a set of objects, “one, two, three, four, five,” that the last number you name is the number of the whole set.