What difficulties do children face when they come to school? Very often these are problems with concentration and inability to include attention when called upon by the teacher, inability to remember the task, especially if the task consists of a chain of consecutive actions, difficulties with prescriptions and math.

How can math classes at age 5-k8 help prepare for school and develop the skills needed for successful learning?

Let’s start with the fact that math is not just numbers and not just arithmetic actions.

It is the concept of number and quantity. If they are formed, it will be easy for a child to learn the composition of a number.
These are spatial concepts, including the ability to feel and control your body in space. This is important both for the child to be able to sit in class without “sailing”, and to work with prescriptions.
These are similarities and similarities, forms and images. In combination with drawing and pattern drawing, the ability to see and understand shapes and similarities prepares the child’s hand and eye for scripts.
This is a game in which you must consider several rules. They teach the child to keep his attention.
This ability to find errors and correct them, which is very important for the learning process.

It is a task with several solutions, prep for gre school.

And it’s also a lot of beautiful and interesting, and beauty and passion increase motivation to learn.
Today I will give you only 3 exercises for example. We do these exercises with children in our math circles. And in the next publications I will talk in detail about each skill and its formation, development, in the context of prep for gre school.

1. Sticker game for the lineup of numbers.

Usually we play in classes with pairs of children, but you can play with one child. An adult shows a certain number of fingers and asks the child to show the same number of fingers, but in a different way. Okay, 5 are all fingers of one hand. But the second pen also wants to play! How do you show 5 fingers of both hands? How else?

2. A moving game of concentration and body control in which you also have to listen to the adult and react to his words.

Actually, this is a variant of the famous game “Easy Go, You’ll Go Further”, only the host says not only “stop”, but also “three big steps forward!”, “two small steps back!”, “turn right and take two small steps”. Many children get confused. But then they learn to react in time, and to react correctly.

3. a game that teaches children to notice small details, feel the line and prepare their hand for prescriptions.

This is a game I’ll show you.

To learn how to draw beautiful letters and numbers, you need to learn to remember what size the letter elements and how they are located. But you can train not only on the letters, but also on other pictures. You can copy funny muzzles.

In the class I lay out a few sheets, each of which has six funny “portraits”. Children must quietly, without telling anyone, choose one character. And on a separate card with a template (face and neck oval) draw a portrait of him. Finished – you choose a new hero and draw him too.

Preparing a child for school is not the ability to understand the letters written in a book and put them into words, not only the knowledge of the shorthand “one-two-two-four-five …”, it is primarily the development of skills that will help the child in the learning process, and in the classroom, and in communicating with the teacher and with other children.