My number one priority when creating early math learning activities is to create activities that tie to my children’s interests and expose them to age-appropriate concepts in a way that is fun and pressure-free.

When parents are navigating early math at home, the question often arises of how to know what makes something “age-appropriate.”

There are many resources available for navigating what math is taught at a given age or in a given school year. We hear these referred to as milestones, learning guidelines, and standards. They’re a useful tool in that they help us navigate what is age-appropriate for a child and what isn’t. For example, it’s helpful to know that a two-year-old is mainly working on understanding the meaning of “1” and “2” rather than thinking our two-year-olds should be ready to start counting a group of 20.

My favorite resources for navigating early math guidelines are Sesame Street’s early math guidelines and NY State’s Pre-K math standards (both active links). If your child is in elementary school in the US, it’s likely they’re following the Common Core State Standards for Math (or a version of standards based off of these standards).

But there are some limitations that come with relying only on guidelines and standards, and it’s necessary to understand how both exposure and learning progressions factor into how children learn math.

First, exposure. While a two-year-old may be capable of learning what “1” and “2” mean, if they aren’t given opportunities to explore these concepts by working with hands-on objects and listening to adults count, we can’t expect them to magically arrive at the understanding that this picture 📖 shows 1 book while this one 📖📖 shows 2. So we can’t just assume that a child understands a given concept based on their age.

Next, progressions. Mathematical concepts develop along a continuum. Think of a ladder. I can’t just jump to the top rung of a ladder without climbing up the lower ones first. In the same way, a child cannot be expected to jump to a higher level of mathematical thinking without first building the foundational levels of understanding that precede. For example, before a child can compare two sets of objects in kindergarten, they must first understand that numbers that occur later in the counting sequence represent larger quantities than numbers that occur earlier. So we can’t just assume a child is ready to work on a given concept because that’s what’s in the standards for their age level. We must first ensure they’ve built the necessary prior understandings first.

For this reason, I build my activities around progressions rather than standards. A progression of how understanding builds helps me pinpoint exactly what a child already knows about a given concept and what they’re ready to start exploring next. As a child follows a progression of understanding, they’ll gain proficiency with the relevant standards along the way.

My early math guide, The What, Why, & How of Number Concepts through 20 outlines the progression from first learning to count all the way through the understanding of 20 built in the first few months of kindergarten. You can find it here: https://www.countingwithkids.com/the-what-why-and-how-of-early-math

A final note about guidelines and standards: It is important to remember that children develop so differently in the early years. So often they are making sense of things in their brains that we don’t see until months down the road. Other times their interests lead them to focus more on one discipline than another. For these reasons, it’s important for us, as parents, not to worry too much in these early years about whether our child is hitting every single math benchmark in exactly the time frame listed. Variance is the norm—another reason I like to focus more on progressions rather than yearly benchmarks.

What's the Difference Between Standards/Guidelines and a Progression of Understanding?