Did you know that setting up an advent calendar for counting the days to Christmas helps your child with kindergarten readiness? For children to develop their number sense they need lots of experiences with numbers.
Calendars are one way to practice seeing the numbers and saying them. It takes a great deal of repetition for children to be able to match the two accurately. A calendar show the number on the date increasing, but at the same time the number of days to wait are decreasing. This is a much harder math idea for older kids.
Calendars are also connected to time. There’s a new number only once a day, helping kids learn the idea of the length of a day. Your idea might be that the day is much longer for you than your child!
To increase the fun and learning, let your child play with some big foam numbers. Older children may be able to place them in order, while for younger ones, just putting the numbers all in a line is fun enough.
Are there some other ways to have fun with numbers today?