Many young learners entering Pre-K may already know how to count and can say the numbers in correct order up to 10 and 20. Children often use fingers to aid their rote counting – saying the number words in the correct order. While developing counting skills and using fingers are important for children’s brain development, the main focus in Singapore Math Pre-K.
Singapore Math Pre-K is for students to build visualization skills to name quantities without counting.
To help students keep counts organized and develop visualization skills, five frame and ten frame cards are used in a special way in Singapore Math Pre-K. These cards are used horizontally and students should start counting from left to right. The reason is that in Western world people read and write from left to right, so it’s important to develop consistency when teaching young learners mathematical vocabulary.
It is extremely important for students to develop the ability to instantly recognize numbers, which is called subitizing. Instantly recognizing “how many” without counting will help students recognize patterns of number sets and combine numbers from the number sets. Subitizing ability is linked to children’s development of numeracy and general mathematical skills. That’s why it’s important to engage young learners in visualization activities and games involving ten frame cards in Singapore Math PreK.
While we don’t offer a formal Singapore Math Pre K curriculum, we highly recommend an engaging app that will help PreK learners develop the ability to subitize. The app is called Visual Math Karate. It contains 11 activities and games that are designed specifically to develop subitizing ability, long-lasting fact fluency skills and eventually “break” children’s habit of over-relying on counting fingers.
Through activities and games, children learn a variety of strategies that will help them visualize, classify, compose, decompose, compare, add & subtract numbers. Acquiring these strategies are crucial for developing deep understanding of numbers, number sense, and the ability to fluently engage in all arithmetic operations.
The activities start with the use of ten frames to visualize numbers within 20 and continue with decomposing and composing numbers to find sums and differences. These activities lay the foundation for understanding base-ten numbers and the place value system. The app is a great resource in Singapore Math PreK. For more information and pricing visit East West Math or click on the link below:
https://eastwestmath.net/collections/math-karate-app/products/visual-math-karate