Preschool Educational Games For Maths

Preschool educational games for maths are so important, children learn more, and at a greater speed, during their preschool years than at any other time.

We need to show them the positive side of learning, that it is not 'work', but 'fun' to learn.

Children love the magic and mystery of playing with numbers, they will delight as they begin to grasp number, and its fundamental meaning, but this is not something that will happen over night, it will take time and patients.

Singing number songs is a great start to introducing your child to numbers.

There are many number songs, and also many CDs and DVDs, that can help you if like me you are not a natural born singer. But it is the enthusiasm you put into the songs, which will have your child asking for more!

Children need to do hands on activities such as Sorting and Matching before they will understand that counting is actually referring to sets of items. We can encourage our children through a wide range of activities so that they can understand and enjoy learning maths. Some great games can include learning maths with shapes, ordering and sequencing and games for counting and recognising numbers up to 10.

Preschoolers naturally want to sort things by colour, shape, and size. When you are watching your child play, you will see this tendency in action, as they try and make sense of the world around them.

They naturally sort their cars by colour and their blocks by size. Watch a child with a handful of crayons and they will often separate the crayons into the different colours that they see.

You can use this need to sort things to make learning early math skills exciting for preschoolers.

Learning to distinguish between things is a major accomplishment for your little preschooler. Whenever possible, let your child help you sort things around the house.

In the kitchen you could sort the fruits and vegetables by colour or the spoons by size or when doing the laundry, sorting the socks by size and color.

Putting things in order or sequencing is a basic maths skill that some children will do naturally, they may put objects in a certain sequence based on size or arrange items of clothing in colour. Your child may arrange his cars in a line from the smallest to the largest.

Ordering can be a fun game, as children begin to think about the sequence of their day, and gain an understanding of the calendar and seasonal timetable.

You can make your own activity cards that your child can put in order, for example, pictures of your child getting out of bed, cleaning his teeth, having breakfast, going to nursery, having dinner, having a story read before going to bed and your child asleep.

Doing simple picture activities like this is a fun way for your child to look at his day, and also understand the order of the day.

Another great picture ordering activity is one of growing up. A picture of a baby, child, adult and an old lady. Talk to your child, about where they are in the order. Children love talking about themselves and this is a great way to talk to your child, and help them learn about ordering.

There are some fantastic learning games for preschoolers to help them learn about shapes, there are also plenty of free activities that you can do at home.

Simple craft play will help your preschooler learn shapes easily and naturally.

You could make small cards with colourful shapes on them, so that when you talk about shapes you can point to them and make comparisons with every day objects, such as round like a plate or square like a window. This will make your child see everyday objects in a new light and firmly place these fun ideas in their memory.

Another idea for a learning games for preschoolers would be, to make you own play dough, and ask your child if they can find shaped items around the house to use as cutters, perhaps using the shape cards, to help him remember what shape is what.

Whatever games you're playing remember to keep talking to your child about each shape, "has the shape got corners?", "how many sides has it got?" so that he learns the important words and phrases to do with shapes.

Don't forget to do 3 dimensional shapes to!

Books that focus on shapes and color are a great way for your preschooler to learn.

A brilliant collection would be the Mr Men books, your child will gradually begin to recognise the shapes the more you read the books. Point to the shape and let your child trace their finger over the outlines. The more you show your child, the faster he will learn and understand the differences in both 2 dimensional and 3 dimensional shapes.

Of course play is the greatest way to learn, other learning games for preschoolers could be a simple Block Building game. Try building different shapes with the blocks and ask your child to find a block of the same shape.

Even tidying up gives you more opportunity to teach, instead of just putting things away try asking your child to pick up all the squares or all the triangles first. You can also do this with cardboard boxes from around the house, kitchen towel cylinder tubes, cereal boxes, or even make your own box!!

There are also many Shape Sorter Toys available that will teach your child all about shape and color, you can even get Shape Dominoes and Shape Bingo learning games for preschoolers.

Art is a brilliant way to teach your child about shapes, these painting and sticking games are great fun and help to reinforce your preschoolers creativity at the same time.

Have fun making houses, rockets or even a robot out of squares, circles, triangles and rectangles. Put your collages up on the wall and talk about the shapes you have used.

All children develop their numeracy skills at different speeds, so it is essential that each child is given the opportunity to develop at his or hers own speed.

Before your child learns to count they need to understand that one equals one item, two equals two items and so on. This is a difficult skill for your preschooler to learn, so have patients, and encouraging your child, will go along way.

You can help your child by doing a small daily activity.

Laying the table is a good idea, as it gets done every day, which is good practice for your child. You could do this in a play situation, do a teddy bear picnic, and let your child share out the sweets or cakes to each of their teddy bears.

Use very small numbers to start with and as your child gets his understanding of association number and quantity, start adding another one at a time.

As you count objects together touch each one. This helps children to understand that they are counting one thing at a time. A good way of doing this is at story time; 'The three bears' is a good one to start, as it repeats up to three, many times. Then gradually as your child successfully does it by himself, give a more challenging book like 'The very hungry caterpillar'.

It is important to build your child's confidence so that he is not uncomfortable with numbers.

To help your child understand the order of number and number symbols, you could make your own number cards, with the number symbols on one side and the number of spots on the reverse.

Lay out the cards with the spots on up to five at first, and ask your child to put them in the correct order. When this is achieved you could make the game a little harder by taking one of the numbers out and see if your child can tell you what number is missing.

Educational toys games for preschoolers will make them a step ahead of the rest, with confidence in themselves and dealing with numbers.

Education Games For Kids

Education Games For Kids, is packed full of the Best Educational Games and Toys for kids of all ages. Whatever your child's age or interests, you will find lots of information to create curiosity and a desire to learn with the Best Educational Games and Toys Around.

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