Teaching Little Fingers New Math Tricks

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Gabi Bagley, 5, dug through a box of Kid K’Nex toys, bypassing rods and cylinders until she found a purple, teardrop-shaped object about four inches long. “Does that fit your hand just right?” said Cyndi Lopardo, her Preschool for All teacher. “Bring it over.”

Gabi was one of four children at Onahan Elementary School learning a mathematical concept — measurement — by searching for items the same length as their hands.

The lesson was developed by coaches from the Erikson Institute to hone the children’s ability to compare and predict size — skills that researchers from Erikson say provide a foundation for success in elementary math but are often neglected in preschool.

Ms. Lopardo has been teaching preschoolers for 17 years at Onahan Elementary. But she said the Erikson coach has helped her create more engaging and effective math lessons.

“I have gotten great results,” she said. “We’ve been talking through ideas and making my practice better.”

That afternoon, Ms. Lopardo’s coach, Katie Morgan, took notes on how she could add more gestures to her teaching style and encourage students to describe objects’ sizes orally. After school, they reviewed a videotape of the lesson.

Coaches from Erikson, a graduate school and research institute that focuses on early-childhood education, have been sharing the math teaching techniques with 60 to 80 preschool and kindergarten-level Chicago Public School teachers since 2007. In September, the program will expand to include all preschool through third-grade teachers at eight public schools.

Ms. Morgan said lessons like the one on measurements were valuable because they are hands-on — a departure from workbook-based math lessons.

The program’s emphasis on concrete problem-solving is new for some teachers who do not have strong backgrounds in teaching math to preschoolers, she said.

Although Ms. Morgan said she didn’t expect 5-year-olds to master addition and subtraction, she said teachers could lay the foundation by asking students to follow patterns or to sort leaves, building-blocks and stuffed animals based on color and shape.

The program is paid for by grants from the federal Department of Education, Chicago Public Schools and the CME Group Foundation, among others.

Jennifer McCray, director of Erikson’s math project, said that there was no national model for teaching mathematics in early childhood and that most teachers receive no specialized training for it in college.

“We have done a pretty good job in early childhood and elementary at teaching literacy,” she said. “Mathematics has been neglected. We have a lot of early-childhood teachers who love kids and may be very good teachers, but they’re not confident in math.”

She said that in a 2007 Erikson Institute survey of 330 public preschool Chicago teachers, they reported teaching an average of just over one hour of math a week, or an average of 13 minutes a day. About a quarter of public school students in the third through eighth grades failed to meet Illinois math standards last year.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/01/us/01cncmath.html?hpw