What Type of Preschool Math Worksheets You Should Use
Preschool math worksheets are an important part of teaching math to young students. You should always have an ample supply of these worksheets in your classroom, so that you can break out a math lesson on the spur of the moment, or according to your lesson plan schedule.
Small children learn very well from worksheets, especially ones that are made to be fun and interesting to them. Fortunately, the educational world is full of worksheets for teaching preschool math. You can find a wide variety of them just about anywhere, from catalogues you can purchase from, to free downloads online, and you can even create your own if you’ve got the imagination for it.
What should go into a good math worksheet for preschool students? First, you’ll want to be sure that the worksheets don’t cover any lessons more complicated than addition and subtraction of single numbers. Ideally, you’ll want to start out with simple number identification of the numbers one through ten before moving on to addition and subtraction. Have students learn what the first ten numbers look like, have them draw those numbers, and use worksheets to help them draw and even color the numbers. Next, you want them to relate those numbers to real world concepts. Show them how many is one, how many is two, etc., and then give them worksheets where they identify which group of apples (for example) contains two, which group contains three, etc.
Remember, numbers are entirely new to preschool students, so you need to start them out with just a very basic understanding of what numbers are and what they represent. This may take half of your school year, especially since you’ll be working on subjects other than math during the year. However, once your students have learned about numbers and what they represent, you can use the second half of the school year to teach them basic addition and possibly some subtraction, just to get them started out on the right foot for Kindergarten.
Before you move into worksheets for adding and subtracting, be sure to do some physical demonstrations of adding to and taking away from groups of objects, and have your students tell you how many of a certain object you now have, after some have been added or subtracted. Then, give them fun worksheets to complete that help them re-enforce this concept by having them do simple addition and subtraction using pictures first, and then actual numbers. Just don’t go beyond the numbers one through ten with your preschool math worksheets, as these are sufficient for preschoolers to learn, and anything higher may be too confusing for them at this point in their learning development.
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