Simple Counting

Number literacy is an important competency in all walks of life. Children’s familiarity and competence with numbers entering formal education is predictive of long-term academic success, even performance on the SATs. Luckily, setting up success in math by building a strong foundation for early math skills is easy. Behaviors as simple as incorporating counting or numbers into daily activities has been shown to strengthen children’s basic comprehension of numbers.

Parents have been shown to have a great deal of influence on their child’s math skills, however, previous research had been correlational in nature. Recently, experts in early learning published the first experimentally-controlled study that examines how parent’s number talk can increase math competency in their child.

In this study, 100 children ages 2-4 were assigned to read a storybook with small numbers (1-3), large numbers (4-6), or a storybook with no numbers. Parents were instructed to read this storybook with their child every day for 4 weeks.

This study found that children assigned to read the small number book (books containing numbers 1-3) performed significantly better on their understanding of numbers at post-test. This is the first empirical evidence to suggest that parent’s number talk is causally related to their child’s understanding and proficiency of early math skills.

For parents and educators, this suggests that the repetitive practice of the small, basic numbers is of critical importance for early learners!