In partnership with the Waterloo Public Library, Kitchener Public Library, Region of Waterloo Library, and the Fields Institute, this program explores how parents/caregivers can use purposeful play to assist their infants and toddlers (12-36 months) to develop number sense. The program is offered weekly this fall (2012):

• WPL (Main Branch): September 27 - October 25, five weeks - 10: 15 - 11:00 a.m. (Thursdays).

Research has shown that babies are born with some sense of an internal number structure (Dehaene, 1999). Research has also shown that young children in educational settings have shown increased mathematical achievement from higher incidences of mathematical talk by preschool/nursery school teachers (Klibanoff et al., 2006). Our own research has shown that many parents during play-time with their children do not engage in number play, or mathematical talk, that may support mathematical learning and achievement. To explain, parents often confuse the ability to count verbally with an understanding of number as "cardinality" (i.e., a number referring to a particular set of items), or "ordinality" (e.g., knowing that three follows two), or "parity" (i.e., when two groups of objects are the same number or equivalent), or the "distance" between numbers (i.e., two is closer to three, but farther from five).

The purpose of this play-based program is to support parents/care givers of young children (12 months to 36 months) in developing the concept of number through stories, games, and songs.There are currently no community programs of this nature that offer parents/caregivers opportunities to learn how to incorporate concepts of numbers into playtime (cf. reading). We are pleased to be able to offer this program to the community.

Click here for more information about this exciting program.

Click here for counting poems used in our program.

To volunteer in this program contact dkotsopo@wlu.ca  or jlee@wlu.ca .