Love of Math Started Early

 

This was written when Jess was just about to turn 3. I really loved watching her figure out how things worked. Her love of Math started early.

Jessie has been counting to 10 for a very long time. She even counts backwards to "blast off!!" when she dons her Space Captain Jessie hat.

Lately her math skills have been growing exponentially. In addition to saying the numbers, she will count objects, and for the most part, even stops when she gets to the end of the things she is counting. Sometimes she seems more interested in having a specific number of things, say 9, instead of counting how many things are actually there. In this situation if she gets to 8 and was more interested in having 9 things, she'll grab another cotton ball, plastic letter, book, what ever to complete the group and make it the proper 9. If another one of the objects is not readily available she'll try a different approach and say the numbers really fast so that she can count something more then once, thus ending up at the desired 9. Unfortunately this method often backfires substantially and she ends up over shooting her target by more then a few numbers, and gets very confused because there certainly aren't 13 things there. That pile is clearly 9!

I've also noticed her ability to add and subtract developing. She can not do this with any really large numbers but any number up to 7 she can add and subtract with abandon. She can even do a couple of complex equations like 2+2=4 or 5-2 =3 if she does them with actual objects. Funny thing though she can not get past the number 7 with this skill. Not that we are particularly trying with any of these things, its just that if she asks I have always counted out how to get the answer for her, but once we get past 7 she entirely loses interest and will start saying any random numbers like 17, 21, 11 or 21.

Yeah she likes 21. She can't always count all the way to 20 correctly... 15-18 are a crap shoot with each try but she definitely knows 19, 20 and 21. After 21, if she is "counting to 100" she'll toss out a few random numbers 43, 87, 52, and then finish off with 99 and 100! It is pretty cute. She knows 22 comes after 21 and 23 is after that so I think she is well on her way to learning the whole thing.

She has also recently discovered zero. She was a master of the whole empty and full thing since she was (as she would put it) an itty bitty baby but now when she has an empty bowl she'll look in it and say, "There is zero in there mommy. There used to be 4 and now there are zero."

Today she asked me if I was 3. When I told her I was many more then 3 she guessed 6, because 6 "is a pretty big number." I didn't have the heart to tell her how big my number really is. I like the fact that I can be 6 in her eyes. Since at her current rate of learning it won't be long before she grasps the whole age thing. Until then I am very happy to be 6.