Los números en la primera infancia / Numbers in Early Childhood

Learning about los números is very important. It serves a foundation for young learners’ first step towards becoming budding mathematicians. In our Early Childhood program, math learning is about counting, number recognition, and one-to-one correspondence. In an attempt to foster their academic development, these skills have also been integrated with their Spanish language experience.

To reinforce their numeral skills, the younger students are being provided with many fun activities during their Spanish class. We began by reading Scholastic’s book, Números. 

Through familiar objects (e.g., puppies, kittens, apples, etc.) the young learners were introduced to the Spanish word for numbers 1 through 5.  On each page, the number symbol was shown as well as the written word and objects that represented the number. Everyone had a lot of fun calling out the number and counting the objects one-by-one, all in Spanish. After the read aloud, a quick entertaining game of los matamoscas (the fly swatters) was played. This is certainly one of the Early Childhood students' favorite games. Soon, we will be doing the same for numbers 5 through 10 and up to 20 with other activities.

Last week we celebrated the “100^th Day of School”.  The 100^th day of school is literally just that, we have attended school for 100 days since September. This milestone served as a wonderful opportunity to teach the 3’s/4’s to count by tens, in Spanish. A short read by Anastasia Suen, El día 100, introduced us to the vocabulary for the number 100. Then, we counted aloud by 10’s…

diez - ten

veinte - twenty

trenta - thirty

cuarenta - forty

 cincuenta - fifty

 sesenta - sixty

setenta - seventy

ochenta - eighty

noventa - ninety

cien - one hundred

…followed with a brief Bingo game. The children had so much fun as they heard the number and looked to match the symbol shown. There is an enormous amount of satisfaction that comes with yelling out the word, “BINGO!” and every student got the opportunity to do just that. What fun!  

Stay tuned as we continue to provide challenging activities to enhance learning the basics of mathematical thinking in our young learners in a second language.