May 2025
Welcome to EFM's May Newsletter!
It is essential that every caregiver in the world reads books and does math with their young children!
EFM believes in every child’s mathematical right to equity, opportunity, and personal fulfillment.
News
Milo + Friends video Clarence Ames and his team at the Utah STEM Action Center have created a new 4-minute video to help parents understand how important early math in the home is and how easy it can be for families to do it. The video is great! Read more about it in this newsletter, or check it out for yourself on YouTube.
Family Night kits and New Board Game Read more about our new kits and board game in the body of this newsletter. Or … you can go to our new Family Nights webpage and check them out directly.
Donations This month we received donations for $150 and $5000. This money is essential for allowing us to create and provide free materials for families and educators. Rest assured that all of this money goes to our programs – we have no salaries to pay.
Celebrating EFM Volunteers
Everyone at Early Family Math is an unpaid volunteer. Our volunteers have been essential for helping us reach people around the world. Since last October I have been recognizing some of our wonderful volunteers, and I am going to continue that tradition this month.
German – Patrizia, Marion, Corinna, Carolin
Whether Swiss or German, these folks want to bring the EFM program to their home countries. Through their efforts 39 of the 58 storybooks are translated and about half of the Five Stages material is translated. When these two tasks are completed you will find more German materials on our website and in our mobile app.
Spreading the Word
There are at least two parts to getting families to change their home math environment. The first part is making them aware that it’s important and that it is easy for them to do something about. The second part is to build networks of support so the families will continue to do it. In this newsletter I want to report some important progress on the first of these two goals.
Clarence Ames and his team at Utah STEM Action Center in the MILO program have been doing good work in this area for years. EFM has been working on how to replicate their work so that it can be done more broadly around the world.
MILO Family Nights
For years, the MILO team has been running family nights in Utah. At this point they have worked with over 8,000 families. An evening at one of these events goes something like this:
The caregivers are briefly separated from their children for a few minutes
The caregivers are given an entrance survey about their math experiences and attitudes. They are then given a presentation explaining how important early math in the home is and that they have all the expertise they need to do a wonderful job at it and that it is easy. They are also introduced to the very simple rules for the commercial game Happy Bunny, and why playing that game really does involve doing lots of math (though they might not have realized it).
The families get back together and play the game together as a family for 20 to 30 minutes with MILO folks moving around the room helping with any questions.
The families that fill out the exit survey get to keep their copy of Happy Bunny.
That’s it, it’s that simple!
Many adults believe that numeracy is all there is to very early mathematics. Upon reflection, they may include shapes such as circles, triangles, squares, and such. They are surprised when shown the importance of object properties and descriptions, grouping and comparing objects, finding patterns and sequencing, and spatial positions and relationships. They are even more surprised when they see the universal importance of problem solving skills and how math can contribute to them. The most surprising of all to them is that all these things can be a natural, fun, easy, and effortless part of their lives with their children! A final surprise is learning how important all of this math is to their child’s future in school and beyond.
Looking at the surveys, the MILO team has about a 95% conversion rate during a Family Night. Families transition
FROM:
we hate math, we’re no good at math, we never do math with our children, we leave math to the schools
TO:
this level of math is easy, of course we plan on doing lots of math with our kids, it’s easy to fit math into our day-to-day activities
95% !!!
EFM Family Night kits
EFM has been looking at replicating this success at a national or even international scale. We are in talks with a service organization to have them put on events starting in the next school year. Part of being able to do this is coming up with a less expensive alternative to Happy Bunny.
EFM and Math for Love has now created an inexpensive to produce board game, Five Flags Peak, with comparable educational value to Happy Bunny. All the game requires is printing on two pieces of stiff paper, taping the pages together, one or two dice, and about 20 inexpensive simple plastic markers. That’s it for this new game, and we hope this will fit into the budgets of many organizations.
MILO + Friends also just put out an outstanding 4-minute video that can be used during the beginning period where the caregivers are being given instructions.
All of these materials can be found in one place on a new EFM Family Nights webpage.
Let EFM Help Your Organization
EFM wants to encourage as many organizations as possible to put on Family Night events. We can’t help you financially, but we are happy to offer any other form of support that you might find helpful. Please don’t be shy about contacting us.
Wrapping Up
I hope you share our excitement at the prospect of having these events all over the world and changing a lot of hearts and minds. Think of what a big difference it would make for the next generation of children!children.
If you have any questions or comments, please send them our way! We would enjoy the opportunity to chat with you. Also, if you are interested in collaborating with us or supporting us in any fashion, we would love to talk with you about ways we can work together!
May 18, 2025
Chris Wright
Chris@EarlyFamilyMath.org
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Early Family Math is a California 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation, #87-4441486.