Exploring Math with Preschoolers

Treshawn Anderson: Hi, everyone, and welcome to "Teacher Time." I'm Treshawn Anderson, and I'm with the National Center on Early Childhood Development, Teaching, and Learning, and today, we are so excited to be here to talk about exploring math with preschoolers. Joining me today is my friend, Judi Stevenson-Garcia. Hi, Judi.

Judi Stevenson-Garcia: Hi, Treshawn. Hi, everyone. Thanks again for joining us for "Teacher Time." So glad you're here with us today for our last STEAM episode of the season, and we just, before we get started, want to just acknowledge that things might be a little bit different than the last time you were with us on a pre-K episode. I know Treshawn and I are at home with our families, so, hopefully, none of them come bursting in the door while we're on, but please forgive us if they do. And we just want to take a minute to say we hope you are safe and healthy, that your families are well, and before we jump into our content for today, we just want to stop and take a second to encourage you to think about some ways that you can take care of yourself so that you're better able to take care of others.

Treshawn: That's right, Judi, and one way you can do this is by taking some time each day to pause and take a deep breath. Try to turn off all the thoughts that you have running through your head, and just focus on your breathing. And here is one way that you can do it that's fun and simple, and you can even do it with your kids: When you need a quick reset, just think, "It's time to take five." So, I want you to do it with me. Hold up your hand, and put your index finger down by your wrist, over here by your thumb, and we're just going to trace up and down our fingers, inhaling on the way up, and exhaling on the way down. So, before we get started with our episode, we're going to take five. Do it with me. Breathe in and out. One last breath in.

Judi: Thank you, Treshawn. That was really helpful, and I like that idea of breathing in and out as you go up and down each finger. I think I'm going to try that with my kids tonight before we go to bed. OK so, today's topic: You know if you've been with us this season, we've been talking about STEAM, which is science, technology, engineering, the arts, and math, and so, each month we've been focusing on one of those components with the arts kind of weaving in and out of each one of those. If you weren't able to be with us for our previous episodes, you can find them in the MyPeers "Teacher Time" community, and there's a link in your "Resources" widget about how to join MyPeers, if you haven't already, and then, we're also in the process of uploading these episodes onto the ECLKC so you can watch them there as well.

Treshawn: Our "Teacher Time" advisor this season is Gail Joseph from the University of Washington, and she's helped us identify preschool books that support STEAM thinking and learning, and she gave us some suggestions for today's episode. So, Judi took a trip to her local library, thankfully, before it closed in March, and later, she'll share what she's found. For today's episode, as usual, Jan Greenberg will be our Q&A facilitator. Hi, Jan.

Jan Greenberg: Hi, Treshawn, Judi, and everyone joining us on today's "Teacher Time" episode. I'll be answering as many questions as I can in the purple Q&A widget about helping preschoolers explore and learn math concepts and skills. I look forward to chatting with you.

Treshawn: Thanks, Jan. She's always so helpful in answering your questions, so be sure to chat with her during this episode. We want to remind you to download that viewer's guide, and you can find it in the green "Resource" widget. We've designed it with spaces for you to reflect and write down new ideas and strategies that you'd like to try, and if you've been with us on our previous episodes, you know that sometimes we give you a "Teacher Time" minute to write down some thoughts and ideas during the webinar. So, when you click on the link to the document, you can print it out and follow along with us, or if you don't have access to a printer right now, you can type right into the document and save it to your computer because it's a fillable PDF.

Judi: OK, that's it for logistics. Let's jump into our topic today, "Supporting Math Thinking & Learning with Preschoolers." Let's start with what we mean when we say "math." So, the Early Learning Outcomes Framework, or the ELOF, as we like to call it, tells us about math in the preschool-cognition domain, and that includes a subdomain of mathematics development. And then, within that subdomain, you have expectations for children's development and learning related to counting and cardinality, operations and algebraic thinking, measurement, geometry, and spatial sense.

Treshawn: Math thinking and learning is also connected to the other ELOF domains. So first, in approaches to learning, preschoolers pay attention, persist and exercise their curiosity and creativity, and next, in the social-emotional domain, there's that sense of identity and belonging and where children really develop their confidence in their skills because we all know that children love to show us what they know about math. And you may not think of this as language and literacy when it comes to math, but preschoolers are learning new vocabulary, such as the names of shapes like triangle and octagon and hexagon and "rhombus," and also positioning like behind, in front of, and above and below. Lastly, they also use their senses and their fine motor skills as they begin to explore and understand basic mathematical and spatial relationships, and that can be found in the perceptual, motor, and physical development domain.

Judi: That's right, Treshawn. This is why I love math so much because through math exploration, children really are developing knowledge and skills in all of the ELOF domains. So, let's take some time to think about the strategies that you can use to support math thinking and learning with preschoolers. This season, we've been talking about three main strategies as a framework for supporting STEAM thinking. The first is creating engaging environments. Second is providing nurturing, responsive, and effective interactions, and then last, we have offering engaging learning experiences and opportunities. So, we're going to talk about each of those today, and as we go through these strategies, I would encourage you to think about how you could share similar ideas with families to help them support STEAM thinking at home. We do have some resources in the resource widget that you can share with families to help them think about and support STEAM at home. There are lots of ways adults can use their home environment to support learning. So, take a look in that "Resources" widget, and then, as we go through the episode today, think about some of the strategies you can also share with families.

Treshawn: Yes, Judi, and since many of us are at home, it would be great to learn ways that we can use what we already have at home to support children's math thinking and learning. So, now we're going to begin by talking about both engaging environments and nurturing, responsive and effective interactions. "Engaging environments" include materials that are open-ended, varied, and accessible. "Open-ended" means children get to choose what they want to do with them, while varied means that there is different kinds of interesting materials, and accessible means that all children have access to the materials and can explore as independently as possible. In box one of your "Viewer's Guide," write down some ideas that you may have about the open-ended, varied, and accessible materials in your learning environments as we talk about them a little more in the episode. Now, for nurturing, responsive, and effective interactions, your interactions with children are nurturing when you provide them with a safe space to explore and learn, and your interactions are responsive when you engage with children in a way that shows you value their interest and needs. And your interactions are effective when you plan intentional activities that are supportive of children's thinking and learning.

Judi: That's right, Treshawn. The materials and the interactions really work together to support children's math thinking and learning. So, when we talk about open-ended materials, in math, it's really just about anything. You can count or sort pretty much any object you have, but it's important to make sure that we give children materials that allow them to be flexible in their thinking, to be creative as they explore and try out new math ideas during their play. So, for example, you want to provide different types of interesting materials to count, to describe, or sort, things that they can match or pair up, like buttons or lacing beads, or even art materials like different colored pom-poms, different types of shapes, and puzzles. All of these will support children's exploration of math concepts during their play.

Treshawn: Counting is probably one thing most people think about when we say "math," and you can certainly encourage preschoolers to count throughout the day. But asking, "How many?" is also important and should always have an intentional purpose. For example, "How many do you have?" isn't that interesting or meaningful of a question unless the counting is initiated by the child, or you're asking them to use counting to compare sets of objects or to solve a problem like, "How much money will this cost?" when you're playing in the geomatic play area or at snack time. "How many friends are here today? We need to know so we can set the table." These examples give the question, "How many?" a meaning.

Judi: Preschoolers are also learning to accurately count the number of objects in a set of objects, and that can be a little bit harder, especially when the sets have more than five and, for older preschoolers, more than 10. And during these years, we still expect a lot of mistakes here, especially once we get into the teens, so they're still learning that, when you count, you have to tag every object only once. And then, while they're focused on that tagging, they also have to remember the sequence of numbers, so you might hear a child counting and saying, "12, 13, 14, 16," and if they're skipping a number in that pattern, it's OK. Preschool is the time where they get to practice and learn.

Treshawn: Then finally, there's understanding how numbers are represented, such as using number symbols like the symbol for one and two and three. But also, there's many other ways that we represent numbers, like with our fingers, "one, two, three, four, five," or using a dice when we play games. So, we're going to watch a video of a child playing with some die. As you watch, listen for him counting and using cardinality to move his game piece to the correct number. There's also some early numerical operations happening here, as well, as he counts up the total of two die, so watch for the strategy he uses when he counts the numbers on each one. Let's watch.

[Video begins]

Child: One, two, three. Three ... Four One, two, three, four. Four. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Eight. Oh. One, two, three, four, five, six. Six. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11. 11. I just did 11!

[Video ends]

Judi: That's a really fun video to watch. I noticed a couple of things. First, he understands cardinality, which if you haven't heard that term, that means when you count a set of objects, you know that the last number you say is how many you have. So, for example, if you count five – "one, two, three, four, five," that means we have five things. He also was able to accurately count up to 11, and that's what we observed in this video. I would imagine he probably can count even a little bit higher than that. And then, also, he used somewhat of a sophisticated strategy for figuring out how many he had altogether. This is something that we use in addition, and you can support your older preschoolers in starting with the larger number and then counting on the smaller number. It's a good strategy, especially when you get into larger numbers to add together. It's going to help by starting with the larger number and then adding on the smaller number. He also, if you noticed, kind of knows right away the number that's on the dice, so the three or the four. When you can recognize a small set without even counting, that's something that we call subitizing, and if you want more information on supporting subitizing, you can find a 15-minute in-service suite on the ECLKC. Also, the link to that is in the green "Resources" widget, giving you more information on how children develop that skill.

Treshawn: This leads us to our next mathematical concept, which is operations and algebraic thinking. Operations is about learning that putting sets of objects together results in more objects, and this is addition, and that taking some objects away from a set results in less objects, which is subtraction. Preschoolers begin to formally apply this idea to smaller sets of objects, such as "one plus one" or "two plus three," or "three take away one." And in the video we just watched, you may have noticed that the boy counted all the dots on both dice, but that was really just addition, right? He was adding the numbers from one die to the other. His strategy was called "counting on," and he used that strategy by starting with the larger number.

So, for example, if you one dice that has five dots and another dice with two dots, well, you start with the five, and then you just go, "Six, seven," to get your total number.

Judi: That's right. If you stop and observe children, they do so many really cool things, and they have great strategies for figuring out answers to problems that they have. And while they're not doing algebra just yet, studying patterns and learning about patterns really sets the foundation for future abilities in solving equations. So, for example, if you look at a pattern, and you figure out what the missing color is or the missing shape, that's similar to trying to figure out the missing element in an algebraic equation. So, patternmaking in early childhood is setting the foundation for success in algebra later on in school. It's important that you encourage children not just to identify patterns, but to create your own patterns, to extend them, and patterns don't just need to be red, blue, red, blue, red, blue, especially for your preschoolers and your older preschoolers. They can take on some challenging patterns like "blue, blue, red, blue, blue, red," any of those. I'm saying colors, but you can use shapes. You can use textures. You can use anything that you want to create patterns but encourage children to identify them and then create their own and come up with more challenging ones.

Treshawn: That's right, Judi. Doing patterns with preschoolers is so much fun, so we're going to watch a video of a child who has made a pattern with clay, and another child who notices the pattern. So, use box two of your "Viewer's Guide" to write down what math concepts the children are exploring, and pay attention to the teacher's responsiveness to the preschoolers as she supports their thinking and their vocabulary. Let's watch.

[Video begins]

Teacher: Look at Miguel. He's making all kinds of balls. Child: Medium, little, big, medium, little.

Child: That's a pattern!

Teacher: That's right. It's a pattern. What kind of pattern is it? Child: Medium, little, big.

Teacher: Medium, that's right. [Video ends]

Judi: So, as you can see, math exploration happens everywhere. This child was just naturally exploring math concepts, such as comparing and ordering by size, and his friend noticed that he made a pattern and identified it using the right vocabulary words: small, medium, big. They could extend that pattern and keep it going. When you speak math or mathematize your language as you interact with children, they begin to develop the receptive and expressive language skills, and then they begin to build and use their math vocabulary and their understanding of math concepts.

Treshawn: Ooh, mathematize. I love when we learn new words on "Teacher Time." So, for dual- language learners, it's important for them to hear math language in their home language as well as in English. This includes counting in their home language but also operation terms like "more than" and "less than" or "how many" and "same and different," and even shape names and attributes. So, if you don't speak a child's home language, you can ask parents or other staff to teach you words for math ideas their children are interested in.

Judi: OK, now we can talk a little bit about measurement. Just quickly, we want to think about what children are naturally interested in, and that is in comparisons of size and comparison of weight. Who ran the farthest? Who ran the fastest? Who is taller? Little kids love to compare themselves to each other to see who's taller. My boys love to compare themselves to me to see how much taller they're getting, and they explore these attributes throughout the day, but then also, when you provide ways for them to think about and talk about measurement, you give them that language that helps them to think about the concepts. So, it's important to provide opportunities for children to think about these concepts, measurement concepts, but then also for you to provide the language, like weight, length, height, distance, using comparison language, longer, shorter, heavier, lighter. And as children explore, they do begin to understand some things about measurement, especially when comparing. It's important to start from the same spot. So, for example, if my boys are trying to see how tall they are compared to me, they know that if they're standing on a step stool, that's not really a fair start or a fair comparison.

So, preschoolers are starting to begin to understand the sophisticated approach to measurement, which requires starting at the same spot.

Treshawn: Another measurement concept children are interested in is sorting and organizing materials by size. You can see on the slides here, there's a science table set up for children to encourage them to seriate. This means sorting something by its gradual changes in a certain attribute, like size, shape, length, or color. You see the shells are sorted by small, medium, and large, and the twigs are sorted by tall, medium, and short. This is a perfect example of how science and math work together. Think for a minute where you might have some materials in your living environment that you could use to support organizing by size, length, weight, or even volume.

Judi: OK, last but not least, we have geometry and spatial sense, which is my favorite piece of our mathematical concepts to explore. So, preschoolers come to school a lot of times with basic shape names, like circle, square, triangle, rectangle. What's important is that we talk to them about the attributes and how they're the same and how they're different. So, a triangle has three sides and three angles, and a square has four sides and four angles. And a square and a rectangle are similar in their attributes, but they look a little bit different. Kids also love, especially older preschoolers, or really get excited about different shape names like hexagon or trapezoid or rhombus. They're starting to understand the relationship between two- dimensional objects and three-dimensional objects. Like, they might notice, for example, on a cylinder, like a paper towel roll, that if you look at the ends, that you can see a circle, and that's a relationship between two and three-dimensional objects. Sorting shapes also gives children the opportunity to think about the differences and similarities in the attributes of shapes.

So, for example, "I'm going to put all of the shapes with three sides in this part, and I'm going to sort all of the shapes with six sides and put them over here." For preschoolers, spatial thinking, it includes exploring concepts like location and position, such as "on top of" or "next to" or "beside." It also includes things like flipping and turning and sliding. Building shapes, putting shapes together, and taking them apart includes this. This is kind of where spatial sense and geometry come together. One of the things that we have in our house that we love, and I brought some, my son shared them with me, is we have these magnetic toys that go together, and they're a great opportunity to kind of look at and explore the properties of shapes. So, for example, my son wanted to tell you that, you know, if you put these two triangles together, they make a square. But we have these kinds of triangles, which these are equilateral triangles, and when you put them together, they don't make a square. And then we also have these really long, stretched-out triangles. So, there's something similar. They all have three sides and three angles, but they do very different things when you flip them and put them together and take them apart. So, don't be afraid to explore with your children and think, "Wow, I wonder why it is that, when you put these two together, they create a square, but the other ones don't." Have fun exploring and flipping and turning to make things fit together – Ooh, I just made a bigger triangle – and you can have some discoveries along with your children and use the attribute language to help them think about shapes and their attributes and how they're similar and different.

Treshawn: I love those magnet blocks, Judi, and they are definitely on my list of things to get for our house. And you look like you're having fun, too, so that's a plus. You can also support children's geometry and spatial thinking and learning by providing outlines on shelves, like the ones you see pictured. This helps children identify and organize shapes by their attributes and match the shapes to the outlines which requires some spatial thinking. Spatial thinking can also be supported by various types of puzzles, which offer children at different levels of ability different challenges, and they also help children think about how shapes have to be turned or flipped in order to fit into a space. Moving shapes to fit them into specific spaces supports their development of spatial thinking.

Judi: So, providing different types of puzzles is part of making sure that your materials are accessible to all of the children that you work with, so you want to make sure that all children can use the puzzles that you have as independently as possible. Younger children might still need puzzles with knobs on them. Remember, accessibility is about making sure that all children can choose and explore materials as independently as possible. For example, if you have lacing beads, you might want to offer different sizes of beads and different types of string or yarn or even sticks that make it possible for all children to string beads and make patterns. For sorting materials, you can build children's small motor skills by offering tweezers, or different sizes, of tweezers to help them choose and sort, which also helps them build their fine motor skills. So, just take a minute, and think about your indoor and outdoor environments and what's suggested in your curriculum related to math learning, interactions, and materials. Are your materials open-ended? Are they varied, and are they accessible? What materials might you want to add to your list now?

Treshawn: So, we've been sharing some ideas with you guys related to learning experiences and opportunities that you can use to support preschoolers' math thinking and learning, but let's take a minute to talk about why the opportunities that we provide are so important. Research tells us that children explore math concepts throughout the day during unstructured playtime, so it's important to provide lots of learning experiences and opportunities that allow them to explore math concepts. So, let's take a minute to listen to Dr. Doug Clements, who worked with us on a previous season of "Teacher Time." He's an expert in how children learn about math, and he's going to explain the relationship between shapes and spatial thinking. As you watch, use box three of your Viewer's Guide to document some new ideas. OK, let's watch. [Video begins]

Crystal Day-Hess: Can you talk to us a little bit about how geometry and spatial relationships are related concepts?

Dr. Doug Clements: Yeah, so to understand geometric forms, you really use a lot of spatial relationships. Just think about, you know, two long sides the same length and describing a figure. They're the same length, means you're making a spatial relationship between the size of those things, so, it's always there, right? We tend to think of spatial relationships as above and below and then shapes as something different, but describing those shapes is very much into spatial relationships. And when we get to composing shapes, when kids start putting shapes together to make other shapes, to make objects, or to make other shapes, so that, for instance, if I had two of these, I could actually, you know, make a rhombus here. So, when they're combining those, they're talking about and thinking about geometric motions, slides, flips, and turns, and those are spatial relationships of an utmost importance, too.

Crystal: And it seems this could come into play when kids are doing more of the traditional puzzles that we often see in classrooms.

Dr. Clements: Yeah, absolutely. So, unfortunately, what many puzzles represent is not a challenge to kids' spatial thinking. So, if you've got an inset puzzle, and kids are putting the cow into the cow shape, that's pretty easy. Preschoolers can do more. So, we do a lot of puzzles where shapes have to go together to make different shapes or different objects to do a picture. Tangrams is an illustration of those when you make a duck or something out of the tangram pieces. Combining those pieces and seeing how they combine is both a spatial relationship of the highest order and knowledge of how shapes make other shapes. [Video ends]

Treshawn: Dr. Clements has so many great ideas. I hope you were able to jot down some. Now, switching gears a little, we know that reading books together is a learning experience that can support children's learning, vocabulary, and understanding of the world around them. Our "Teacher Time" advisor, Gail Joseph, recommended a few books for us to support math thinking and learning, and Judi was able to get some of those books at her local library before it closed down. So, she's going to share some books that you can use in your programs to encourage children's math skills, learning, and exploration. Use box four of your Viewer's Guide to take some LAB notes. What concepts will children be learning? What's some advanced vocabulary that you found in the book, and how can you take that learning beyond the book? Let's watch. [Video begins]

Judi: OK, so if you've been with us this season, you know that this does not look like my library, and that's because my library is still closed, so I decided to come to my favorite place in my house where I like to sit and snuggle with my boys, and we sit together and read books. And we have some soft, snuggly friends with us, and we have a shelf full of books next to us, and I will say that one of the silver linings of the past few months of spending a lot of time at home has been that we've gotten to spend a lot more time sitting and reading together, so that's been really fun. So, I have just a couple books I'm going to share with you today. These books and more are listed in the "Resources" widget, so you can download the list of books and the explanations of what's in them, but I just wanted to share a couple with you, some that have really been inspiring to me recently. This one I absolutely love. It's called "Flow, Spin, Grow," and it's by Patchen Barss and Todd Stewart, and what I really love about this is that the concept that children are going to be learning about in here is patterns, so that's the learning, the L in LAB, and it's all about looking for patterns in nature and kind of thinking about it in really unique ways.

So, looking at trees and the patterns that we see in trees. There's a lot of really great advanced vocabulary in here, so if you want to flip through the book first before reading it, you'll see words like "galactic halos" and "swirling eddies." And so, it's a little bit different way of thinking of where we can find patterns and how we can appreciate them in nature, and then also, you know, it's definitely more about finding them in our environment. So, our natural environment, wherever we are, if we live in the city, or if we live in the country, we can look outside in our world and find patterns. And my favorite thing about this book is that at the end, it says, "Not only can you explore patterns, but you can join the show," and basically, this means that you are a part of patternmaking in your environment. There's a little author's note at the end, too, which gives you some factual information about how patterns exist in nature, so it's just kind of a fun book to think about, to use together. You can take this beyond the book, look throughout your environment, inside or outside, where you see patterns that are represented here, and maybe even take it beyond the book into the art area. You can use materials from nature or some of your art materials just to make some of the patterns that you see here in this book.

OK, book number two, this is super cute. This is about measurement. This is called "How Big Is a Foot?" and some of you may be familiar with this book. It's just a beautiful little story about a king who wants to build a bed for his wife, and so, he uses his feet to get the apprentice to understand how long and how wide the bed needs to be. The only problem is that the apprentice has slightly smaller feet than the king, and so, guess what happens? The king wants a bed that is 3 feet wide and 6 feet long, and when the apprentice uses his feet, he ends up with a bed that's a little bit too small for the queen, and unfortunately, the king gets very upset, and the apprentice ends up in prison. So, he does think – think – think about what a solution to this problem might be. This is a fun thing to get your kids to think about. "Why in the world would the bed be too small if the apprentice followed the directions?" And so, thinking about the differences in nonstandard measurement tools, if we use our hands, what's important to understand about our hands? If I use my hands to measure something, and then, you use your hands, and your hands are smaller, then we're going to end up with a problem. So, it's a great way to introduce this concept of measurement and why standard measurement, like a block, using blocks that are all the same size, is really important.

OK, and then, the last thing I have for you, this is a strategy that I've used that maybe some of your families can use, or even you can use if your library is still closed, but my library subscribes to an app that I downloaded onto my tablet. And so, I can actually access books on my tablet.

This one is called "I Know Numbers!" So, the concept here, obviously, is number recognition, but also, what's great about this book is it allows children to explore all of the different things that numbers can mean. So, we use numbers for choosing a television channel. We use numbers at the grocery store, right? So, numbers can represent how much something costs. It can also represent your size, how big your shoe size is, or how big your clothes are. So, all of these different ways that we can look at numbers or find numbers in our environments is, again, a great way to take it beyond the book, do a number hunt. But then also, it's really important to talk about the different things that numbers mean, a number for a temperature. Like, "It's 60 degrees outside," means something different than if you're 60 years old, right? So, preschoolers love big numbers. You can go as big as you want, but it's also great to talk about how numbers are used and what they can be used for and then, also thinking about recognizing numbers, especially for your younger preschoolers. So, I hope you can take some inspiration from these books and the other books that we're talking about that I have left for you in the Resources widget. Please encourage your families to mathematize their language and to explore math thinking with their children every day through books and in their environment as they live and learn together. [Video ends]

Treshawn: Thanks, Judi. I just love those books, and I love your cozy space for reading. Thanks for sharing that with us. Finally, much of what we've talked about today includes a combination of math and the arts, like creating patterns, and clapping our hands to a rhythm, and putting shapes together to create new shapes like Judi did with the Magna-Tiles. The arts offer sensory, creative, and problem-solving opportunities, and they're also a really powerful way for children to connect with nature, like using materials from the outside like stones and sticks, and maybe even counting the pieces of mulch. The arts can also support children's connections to their culture and their identity. Like if making beaded jewelry is important to the family, maybe you can provide plastic or wooden beads that preschoolers can use to make a beaded necklace or a bracelet.

Judi: One of my favorite materials to include in an art area is paint-color samples from the hardware store. This is something that families could even have access to, to use at home. You can cut them up and have children order them by shades of light to dark, or dark to light. You can also encourage children to explore different shades by mixing different amounts of white paint with the same color. So, for example, if you have several cups of red paint, you can add 1 teaspoon of white paint to one cup, add 2 to the next cup and then so on, and then use the paint and compare the differences in shade. Can you see the different shades of red that the child used in this painting?

Treshawn: I love that idea, Judi, and I might try that at home this week with my kids. Well, there's so much that we can say about preschoolers and math, but we're just about out of time. Remember, supporting math learning helps children develop in all of the ELOF domains, as we've said throughout this episode, so be a mathematician with children and explore together. But before we go, we want to tell you about some resources to support your work with the little scientists and mathematicians in your programs.

Judi: So, if you or your ed manager are looking for more resources to help you support children's mathematical thinking and learning, you can visit the Math Learning Trajectories page on the ECLKC. There, you'll find videos and suggestions for teaching strategies that support preschoolers and their mathematical thinking. You can also find helpful information about children's development of number and numerical operations in this 15-minute in-service suite that I mentioned earlier. This is also available on the ECLKC.

Treshawn: Next, we have MyPeers, and MyPeers is a virtual informal social community where you can exchange ideas and share resources and lend support to the Early Childhood community. If you haven't already, join. Please do. You can do so via the ECLKC, and we'll also post a link here in this episode. You'll find us in the "Teacher Time" community, where we've been posting more videos and sharing some strategies related to supporting the little scientists in your program. We'll be there all summer long, so we hope to see you there. And don't forget to download any resources from the green "Resource" widget that you think will be helpful.

We've also included a link to an ECLKC page that has many additional resources to help you address concerns related to our current situation. Thanks again for joining us this season. For those of you that have been with us all season, we hope you've gained some helpful strategies for supporting preschoolers and exploring STEAM concepts. We've definitely enjoyed sharing strategies with you.

Judi: Yes. Thank you so much for being with us this season. It's been great to share with you about supporting STEAM thinking for preschoolers, and before we go, I just wanted to let you know that we have heard you. We've heard from many members in the "Teacher Time" community about the need for supports to work with children and families while your programs are closed, so we are planning on hosting an extra episode of "Teacher Time." It's going to be on May 28th from 3:30 to 5 o'clock. That's a Thursday, so it's different day and a different time than we've been usually having our webinars this season, so plan to join us for an hour and a half. We're going to share some strategies with you about how you can continue to support children's learning from a distance, and we'll take the last 1/2 hour or so to answer your questions live. So, we hope you'll join us. Again, it's Thursday, May 28th, from 3:30 to 5. Look in your in-boxes for some information on how to register for that, and we hope to see you there.

Treshawn: Yes, Judi. I'm looking forward to this new episode. But before we go, we wanted to send you our best wishes from all of us here at "Teacher Time." Thank you so much for all of the work that you're doing to continue caring for children and families, even if it's virtual for now. We hope you and your families stay safe and stay healthy, and please remember to take care of your mental health. Make the time each day to take some deep breaths and stretch and

take a walk, or listen to music, or just do something fun. But we hope to see you again on May 28th, but until then, be well, everyone. Bye!

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