Early Math Activities for Home and School

LLAMA includes the four key preschool math areas of Numbers & Operations, Shape & Space, Pre-Algebraic (Patterning), and Measurement skills.

Preschool math is more than just numbers! Math for preschoolers also includes important shape and space, pre-algebraic thinking (patterning), and measurement skills.

Here are some ideas to engage in fun math learning at home and in school. For even more research-based math activity ideas, visit these blog posts from Imagine Children’s Museum (Everett, WA). These posts were written by LLAMA’s University of Washington Graduate Student Researcher, Clarissa Alfes, EdS, NCSP.

Numbers & Operations skills: http://blog.imaginecm.org/preschool-number-play-countless-benefits/

Shape & Spatial skills: http://blog.imaginecm.org/shaping-preschoolers-geometry-skills/

CRIEI 2022 Presentations

We recently attended the 2022 Conference on Research Innovations in Early Intervention (CRIEI) in San Diego, CA. We presented in one of the poster sessions an outline of our first year of work on the LLAMA project.

We also organized a CRIEI panel on Applying a Social Justice Framework in Early Childhood Measurement Development. Here’s the abstract for that session.

There is growing attention to racial, ethnic, cultural, and linguistic bias in assessment (e.g., Randall, 2021; Sireci, 2021), raising questions about how we can apply a social justice framework in developing measures for use in early education settings. Although measurement development has routinely considered cultural issues (e.g., differential item functioning, measurement invariance), these new frameworks challenge us to rethink our traditional approaches to measurement from construct representation to administration procedures. Catalyzed by Randall’s (2021) article on anti-racist measurement, this session presents three projects and their efforts to consider centering measurement work in a social justice framework. We acknowledge this is a complex topic; the efforts described are intended to serve as a catalyst for discussion and not as examples of established practices necessarily. Our intent is to engage in critical and open discussion about what a social justice framework means in measurement development and how we move forward.