Research on children’s learning in the first five years of life validates the importance of early experiences in mathematics for lasting positive outcomes (Bowman, Donovan & Burns, 2001). Through A Learning Bee Academy’s STEM education preschool mathematics curriculum, preschool children develop the ability to reason mathematically and become increasingly sophisticated in the ability to recognize and analyze the mathematics inherent in the world around them. Our students learn shapes, number concepts, spatial awareness, measurement, patterns and sorting, and logic. Children’s early mathematics experiences play a significant role in the development of their understanding of mathematics and serve as a foundation for their cognitive development, through STEM education.
Mathematics is the study of quantity, structure, shape, and change. It provides a foundation for many aspects of daily life, including for much of science, technology, and engineering. The mathematical sciences include more than numbers and arithmetic—they also deal with such topics as geometrical figures and structures, measurement, and logical argumentation. Mathematicians and children doing math use the practices of mathematics to identify patterns and structures and to understand and explain things that happen around them.
Early learning in mathematics and science:
- Promotes socioemotional development. Doing quality STEM leads to social and emotional growth and fewer challenging behaviors.
- Supports the development of STEM-related habits of mind. These habits of mind include curiosity, critical thinking, communication, collaboration, persistence, problem-solving, and positive attitudes toward science and mathematics.
- Helps with later learning in all subjects. Learning and doing science and mathematics contributes to gains in those subjects, supports literacy and language development, and is associated with increased reading comprehension and stronger writing skills. These improvements carry over into subsequent grades, and in mathematics, they can predict later achievement.
- Benefits students from all backgrounds. Children who are non-English speakers, for example, can engage in powerful science explorations that help them build knowledge and understanding in STEM while they are learning English. These experiences can place low language demands on children and provide them with opportunities to hear, gain understanding of, and use common English vocabulary, as well as STEM-specific language (e.g., area, properties, force, pattern), in context.
STEM education preschool mathematics, with high-quality experiences, young children from all backgrounds can:
› Engage in various forms of mathematical reasoning, including logical reasoning with familiar ideas or situations, and build arguments that explain their mathematical thinking.
› Make sense of measurement and geometry concepts such as length, area, and volume.
› Begin learning to engage in powerful arithmetic thinking, even in preschool, including relating addition and subtraction to counting, and composing and decomposing numbers using visual (and other) models.
› Reason in powerful ways about algebraic structure and relationships, even using important mathematical representations such as variable notations.
The reasoning concepts that are the basis of mathematics are the beginning of more advanced and complicated concepts that students will need throughout their lives. A Learning Bee Academy offers both basic and advanced mathematical concepts so that our students are ready to excel in their school environment while meeting each student where they are and helping them reach their highest potential.