K-1 mathematics is a crucial foundation
Children can miss content during kindergarten and first grade for many reasons. Perhaps they were not developmentally ready to pay enough attention to the material (Duncan et al., 2007; Pozuelos et al., 2014). Perhaps they moved to a school with a different curriculum sequence. Perhaps they had uncorrected hearing or vision problems. Perhaps a difficult situation at home or in school made it hard to focus in class. Perhaps they decided that they did not want to learn mathematics after a previous unpleasant experience. Perhaps they missed school during extended illness. Or perhaps they did not have adequate access to distance learning resources when schools closed.
The mathematics these children missed may seem easy, but it is absolutely critical for future success (Jordan et al., 2009; Jordan et al., 2010, Geary, 2011; Geary et al., 2013). Kindergarten and first grade curricula are designed to help students build foundational knowledge about numbers. Numbers are not just words to be recited in a particular order or symbols to be written in a particular way; they represent amounts (Fuson, 1991; Richardson, 2012, p. 44). When learners have not had enough experience thinking about the amounts (sometimes called “magnitudes” or “quantities”) that numbers represent, even the simplest arithmetic is naturally difficult.
Imagine trying to read if you didn’t already have the knowledge of which sounds the letters make. It would be difficult, right? In the same way, for a learner who did not have the full kindergarten and first grade experience of thinking about numbers as amounts, adding those amounts is naturally difficult.
It is never too late to learn
Learners can build foundational knowledge about numbers at any age. It is never too late. These games give older students the number basics they need for success.
The graphics here support older students. Many activities teaching foundational mathematical concepts have a 5- or 6-year-old in mind. This can be a problem, as child-specific fonts and non-content-related pictures (of toys, cartoon characters, etc.) may offend or irritate older students. That is why you will not see such illustrations on these games.
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References
Duncan, Greg J., Amy Claessens, Aletha C. Huston, Linda S. Pagani, Mimi Engel, Holly Sexton, Chantelle J. Dowsett, Katherine Magnuson, Pamela Klebanov, Leon Feinstein, Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, and Kathryn Duckworth. 2007. “School Readiness and Later Achievement.” Developmental Psychology 43(6): 1428-1446.
Fuson, Karen C. 1991. “Children’s Early Counting: Saying the Number-word Sequence, Counting Objects, and Understanding Cardinality.” In Kevin Durkin and Beatrice Shire (Eds.), Language and Mathematical Education (p. 27-39). Milton Keynes, GB: Open University Press.
Geary, David C. 2011. “Cognitive Predictors of Achievement Growth in Mathematics: A 5-year Longitudinal Study.” Developmental Psychology 47(6): 1539-1552.
Geary, David C., Mary K. Hoard, Lara Nugent, and Drew H. Bailey. 2013. “Adolescents’ Functional Numeracy Is Predicted by Their School Entry Number System Knowledge.” PLOS ONE 8(1): e54651. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0054651
Jordan, Nancy C., David Kaplan, Chaitanya Ramineni, and Maria N. Locuniak. 2009. “Early Math Matters: Kindergarten Number Competence and Later Mathematics Outcomes.” Developmental Psychology 45(3): 850-867.
Jordan, Nancy C., Joseph Glutting, and Chaitanya Ramineni. 2010. “The Importance of Number Sense to Mathematics Achievement in First and Third Grades.” Learning and Individual Differences 20(2): 82-88.
Pozuelos, Joan P, Pedro M. Paz-Alonso, Alejandro Castillo, Luis J. Fuentes, and M. Rosario Rueda. 2014. “Development of Attention Networks and Their Interactions in Childhood.” Developmental Psychology 50(10): 2405-2415.
Richardson, Kathy. 2012. How Children Learn Number Concepts: A Guide to the Critical Learning Phases. Rowley, MA: Didax, Inc.
August 12, 2020