NASHVILLE, Tenn. — They love to tap it, swipe it, and watch it, but can kids as young as four and five years old use tablets not just to view videos, or read books, but to learn math?
Four-year-old Reuben loves to count, especially when it comes to counting his food.
Reuben’s mom Ayelet Berger told Ivanhoe, “He tells me how many crackers he wants, how many cookies he wants and then if he’s eating the cookie and he has more than one, he’ll be like I had two cookies and then he’ll eat it and say now I have one cookie.”
Vanderbilt developmental psychologist Erica Zippert, PhD, said kids can use objects all around them to do math, including tablets.
“Given the increased prevalence of tablets, it was really important for us to start to look at how parents and preschoolers might be exploring math on these digital devices,” explained Zippert.
In a University of Maryland study, Zippert observed four- and five-year-old kids as they played a math-related computer board game with their parents. Half the parents were told to use the opportunity to help their child learn about numbers, such as naming the numbers on the spinner and counting spaces moved.
The other half were given no guidance aside from instructions on how to play the game. She found, “When we prompted parents to focus on teaching their child about numbers, we saw a significant increase in parents' number talk.”
The finding suggests that tablets can be used to promote math talk between parents and kids if they are doing it together.
Zippert said, “The things that were really helpful that parents were saying were things like, ‘why don't you count for me?’”
Other things parents can do: name numbers on spaces or the spinner, count the number of spaces moved, and even add or compare numbers.
With a lot of math-related apps out there, Common Sense Media offers parents a guide to some of the best math-related apps for their kids, including Bedtime Math and PBS Kids Lab.
