Inspiring Joy and Curiosity in Early Math Learning

Math is all around us. It hides in plain sight: in zebra stripes and kitchen measuring cups, in counting snacks and in “number hunts” at the grocery store. Mathematics, however, is more than numbers and counting. It is also shapes, patterns, and positions.

With support from the Heising-Simons Foundation’s Education program, over the past decade educators, advocates, and researchers have been illuminating the value that mathematics brings to our young children’s learning. The term “early math” refers to the foundational concepts that infants, toddlers, and children in the early grades learn about to make sense of the world—including counting, spatial reasoning, and pattern recognition. Reading gets all the love, but research has found early math skills to be at least as predictive as early literacy skills for a child’s later academic success. Building on these findings, a multidisciplinary coalition has developed tools to help educators, trainers, and families weave math into children’s everyday lives. Moreover, this knowledge base is now being brought into classrooms, homes, and everyday settings, infusing early math learning with newfound curiosity and delight. Read the full story below.

Harnessing Adults' Role in Math Learning

"Kids are excited to count and notice patterns and measure things. They don’t think that math is hard or boring."

Dr. Kimberley Brenneman, Education Program Officer, heising-simons foundation

“Math doesn’t exactly have the reputation of being joyous,” said Kimberly Brenneman, Ph.D., program officer of the Education program at the Heising-Simons Foundation, which has championed these efforts for well over a decade. This “bad rep” can be a serious barrier to making progress for young children because adults are young children’s partners in learning. “If parents, caregivers, and early educators are anxious about math or think it’s just a school subject, why would they engage in it with children? But kids are excited to count and notice patterns and measure things. They don’t think that math is boring or too hard. We want to make sure they never develop those negative ideas that, unfortunately, are too prevalent among adults.”

In the U.S., negative attitudes may contribute to children being far behind their peers abroad, as U.S. students rank 28th out of 37 OECD member countries in math. Could these results change if educators intentionally nurtured children’s curiosity and wonder about math, and families enjoyed more mathematical talk and play during everyday activities with their children? What if math puzzles were incorporated into playgrounds? What if children used songs and dancing to learn about numbers? What if more families and educators wove math into daily tasks, like folding laundry and sharing snacks with friends?

For years, experts have been working to reverse these trends, starting with the earliest years of a child’s life. Together, they have developed tools and resources to make this vision a reality—through science, art, and collaboration.

Building a Base of Knowledge

"When we started, very little attention was given to early math."

Deborah Stipek, DREME Network Faculty Director

The Development and Research in Early Math Education (or DREME) Network at Stanford University was started by the Heising-Simons Foundation in 2011, following a convening that gathered academic researchers to brainstorm how to improve math skills among young children. Around that time, research emerged that showed that math skills at kindergarten entry predicted children’s math skills throughout elementary school and even their literacy skills. These findings led to increased interest in how to best foster early math learning.

The DREME Network linked 12 members from 12 universities to develop an applied research program focused on improving young children’s opportunities to learn math and to support new researchers who focused on early math. The work led to the creation of research-based math resources to support the work of teacher and parent educators as well as teachers and parents. Network members brought diverse expertise to the work: some specialized in children with special needs, others in teacher preparation, and yet others focused on family engagement.

Video: Overview of the DREME Network and Heising-Simons Foundation’s contribution.

“I couldn’t do research any other way, especially if you want to influence practice,” said DREME Network Faculty Director Deborah Stipek. “If you want to do research on rats in the lab, maybe you don’t need that, but if you want to do practical research that’s going to be meaningful in real-life settings, then you need those different perspectives and backgrounds and methodologies.”

At its inception, DREME prioritized building a foundation of research on early math. “When we started, very little attention was given to early math,” Stipek said. “Most of the attention was on early literacy.” The work was iterative, moving back and forth between developing and testing resources in the settings they were designed to be used in. Practitioners played an important role in every phase of the work and contributed significantly to the practical usefulness of what was developed.

Photos: Bite-sized “Math Snacks” from DREME Network’s Family Math Resources. Families with young children can access small math activities via DREME’s website to incorporate early math in everyday life.

The DREME Network’s main goal was to bring together scholars and researchers across disciplines in a collaborative effort to promote young children’s early math development. As the initiative’s research comes to an end, its legacy lives on through the experts it’s cultivated and the work that is being continued. More than 70 DREME affiliates are now teaching at institutions across the globe, like the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences and Hong Kong Education University. DREME contributed to a boom in early math scholarship, too: the number of early math articles in ten leading early education and math education journals increased six-fold between 2008-2012 and 2018-2022, from 50 to 304.

Lessons from DREME’s research and that of others are also shaping projects and programs in the U.S. devoted to nurturing family math talk and play and fostering math joy. The results are joyfully surprising.

Playful Learning Landscapes

“It’s not uncommon for people to be pretty exclusively focused on numbers when they’re thinking about early math. But there is this critical role of our understanding of our spatial world.

Eric Dearing, executive director of the Walsh Center for Thriving Children at Boston College and MathTalk partner

All that research has brought math to unexpected places. In Boston (and other places), the organization MathTalk uses stories and art to bring math into zoos, bus stops, nature trails, and even a clinic to reach the families that need it the most.

“A central piece of their mission is in giving greater access to and providing greater awareness around and creating greater inclusion around the many ways that we can be playfully involved in early math through conversations between children and families and through direct interaction with the world around us,” explained Eric Dearing, executive director of the Walsh Center for Thriving Children at Boston College and MathTalk partner. “One of the really exciting ways they do that is through installing what often gets called ‘playful learning landscapes’ in places where children and families already spend time.”

Omo Moses, Founder and CEO of MathTalk, elaborates: “Kids learn math best in their own common language and through places and people that are familiar to them—through a local context. Our real innovation is thinking about how technology can really be a facilitator for adults and kids having positive math experiences at home, in their community, and connecting those experiences to more formal learning opportunities.”

The Brookside Community Health Center, which primarily serves low-income residents and Dominican immigrants, features a playful learning landscape of its own. In the waiting room, children can step on life-size giraffe footprints on the floor. If they scuttle around the corner, they’ll find a life-size baby giraffe on the wall. Inside exam rooms, young patients can follow baby zebra footprints, too. Children don’t even realize they’re learning math when they engage with the artwork.

Photos: These math installations at Brookside Community Health Center encourage children to recognize shapes while they walk, use the scale of animals and handprints to make comparisons and measure height, and understand number lines and counting patterns. (Photos courtesy of Walsh Center for Thriving Children at Boston College.)

“It’s not uncommon for people to be pretty exclusively focused on numbers when they’re thinking about early math,” Dearing said. “But there is this critical role of our understanding of our spatial world. That includes the ways that children need to learn to identify shapes and the features of those shapes and how to discriminate among those shapes.”

That’s why MathTalk’s clinic installation prompts children to compare their size to the wildlife displays. This helps little ones develop positional language and an ability to reason spatially. As children advance in their math learning, these skills set them up to succeed in subjects like algebra.

“We’re all math people, and we’re all math families,” Dearing said. “A lot of the work we’ve been doing has just been in helping families uncover the ways that their lives with their young children are so enriched with math already.”

That means connecting lessons to families’ lives and experiences, too. At the community health center, exercises involve papayas and flowers Indigenous to the Dominican Republic. These cultural connections are powerful, but collaborators haven’t stopped there. They’re also developing resources and tools in Spanish. An additional added value of this approach is that it is highly scalable. Clinic visits are quite common for kids, medical professionals are highly trusted and use math in their daily work, and the clinics have been looking for ways to engage families while they wait for their appointments.

Bringing Math Inside the Family

"We want family math to exist anywhere that families are."

Jamie Annunzio Myers, chief operating officer and SVP of education at PBS SoCal

There’s no better place, however, to make math fun than at home. Since 2018, PBS SoCal has been working directly with community members to create bilingual materials for parents, connecting to the cultural backgrounds of families. Since launching a pilot project in Compton, it has since expanded its resources to Spanish-speaking and English-speaking families across the country, and has been advising PBS stations on how to develop similar resources.

Most households know PBS through its TV programs, but its website also offers early childhood math activities, games, videos, and free virtual events in Spanish. These materials aren’t translated, either. PBS SoCal creates them in Spanish from scratch, alongside its English resources.

Video: PSC SoCal’s Family Math is a research-based, multiplatform, bilingual program, in English and Spanish, that focuses on building math positivity, confidence and knowledge of foundational math skills for families with children ages 2-5.

“Parents and caregivers can be equipped to facilitate a really meaningful experience at home—but through play,” said Jamie Annunzio Myers, the chief operating officer and SVP of education at PBS SoCal.

The reach of PBS SoCal’s Family Math keeps growing. Family Math operates in more than 50 organizations nationwide, including school districts, libraries, and more than 20 local PBS affiliates, and the team keeps developing new resources meaning more and more children will engage in playful math with their families and teachers.

“We want family math to exist anywhere that families are,” Annunzio Myers said. “We’re connecting everywhere a child might be with all the adults who circle a child.”

Charting a New Future for Early Math Learning

These organizations—from DREME to MathTalk, from Boston College to PBS—have helped chart a new future for early math, one rooted in joy, curiosity, and play. And they are far from alone. More and more, organizations that focus on family engagement, literacy, or early education more broadly have begun incorporating early math. Educators and those that prepare teachers need support to strengthen this fundamental pillar, but so do the people raising children outside of school classrooms. A community of people uplifts children’s lives. It’s not only their caretakers; it’s their teachers, doctors, neighbors, and animated friends, too.

“Over the past decade or so and following a systematic philanthropic strategy, we started with building the evidence base, to designing evidence-informed programs and resources for early math, and then shifted to scaling up by bringing more organizations to the cause, and spurring high-impact collaborations,” said Dr. Brenneman. “We still have a lot of innovative and worthy work to do, but it’s exciting to see the progress that we’re making towards a world in which children—and the adults who learn with them—are supported as powerful and engaged math learners and doers.”

This story was written by Yessenia Funes. She is available on all major social media @yessfun.