June 2025
Welcome to EFM's June 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.
Guest Author & Workshop
This month’s newsletter is guest written by Erin Wahler-Cleveland, EFM board member, long-time middle school math teacher, and mom of 3- and 5-year-old girls. Erin discovered Early Family Math in her quest to deepen her own understanding of early childhood math while building Roots and Wings Math—a new venture focused on empowering parents to foster strong foundations and positive mindsets for math learning with their toddler and preschool-age children.
You’ll find more information at the end about how to sign up for a free workshop Erin is leading this evening for parents and caregivers of young children—you can join live or catch the recording for a week after.
Parent Ninja Move:
Make Story Time Double as Math Time
Each month, this newsletter begins with the quote:
“It is essential that every caregiver in the world reads books and does math with their young children!”
Like many parents, I’ve absorbed the message about the importance of early literacy—starting with the simple, powerful advice to read to your kids. But when it comes to math, what does it mean to “do math” with our young children?
As an often-overwhelmed parent of two little ones, I’m all for anything that accomplishes two goals at once—especially when it actually deepens the experience rather than diluting it.
Enter the parent ninja move: using story time to also spark early math interactions. EFM publishes books that make this connection explicit, but I will boldly claim that you can create math moments in any book your child loves. What follows is a specific example from our home.
From Bedtime Story to Math Discovery
My daughters, ages 2 and 5, go through lots of fads - sound familiar? They want to eat the same snack every day until suddenly, it falls out of favor and we are on to the next new favorite (and I try to figure out how to not waste the last third of the Costco-sized box for whatever it was). The same thing happens with bedtime books.
Recently, Janelle (5 years old) went through a period of fandom for a very cute book called Ten Little Ladybugs by Melanie Girth. It had languished on the shelf for years, and all of a sudden she picked it up and wanted to read it every night for close to two weeks.
Not having seen this book for a while, I was excited about its potential for an easy early math entry point with my younger daughter, Jonylah (Jo-NYE-lah, 2 years old at the time). Janelle’s counting and early numeracy skills are well beyond counting up to and back from 10, but Jonylah is at the perfect stage for interacting with the number sequence going backwards.
But Janelle had picked this book, and her book picks are sacred, so off we went reading Ten Little Ladybugs bedtime after bedtime.
Maybe ten days into this streak, she stopped on a page and asked:
“How many spots are on the ladybugs?”
What a delightful mathematical question, and a beautiful opportunity to capitalize on Janelle’s natural curiosity! I strongly believe these moments are best—when a child asks the question themselves, there’s an internal motivation to figure out the answer. My job is to help with any skills she needs to learn on the journey to answering her question.
Janelle went with an approach of counting one-by-one. It’s not very often we’ve stumbled upon a natural opportunity to count so high, and it was fascinating to watch. About halfway through I managed to get a video started. Take 30 seconds to watch.
Did you catch when she said “twenty-nine, twenty-ten” and then stopped to correct herself? And when she lost track of her count in the thirties, and ended up getting off by one on the second-to-last ladybug? She counted 41; my count looking back at the page is 42. Despite this mistake, let’s look at some of the early numeracy skills going on here.
The Learning Behind the Ladybugs
This is a great demonstration of one-to-one correspondence (the principle that we say one count for each individual object), and how it’s tougher to keep track of a count when the thing you’re counting is randomly arranged.
Janelle also shows us that she has a grasp of the principle of cardinality—when she finishes her count, she reiterates that there are 41. This developmental milestone typically happens in the 3-5 age range. Children who haven’t yet reached this understanding will restart their count if you ask them how many objects there are, even if they’ve just finished counting.
This is one of those skills that feels beyond obvious in adulthood—I doubt any of us remember what it’s like to not yet have mastered this principle! Yet cardinality marks a significant step in mathematical learning and is a prerequisite for understanding the operations of addition and subtraction.
In my Roots and Wings Math parent newsletter, I share real-life math moments like this weekly—and often they are ones that come up during story time. If you're a parent of a toddler or preschooler, I’d love to have you in our growing community. Interested? Subscribe here.
Your Timing Is Great - Free Live Workshop Tonight
Reading this on June 18th? I’d love to have you tonight at 4:30pm PT/7:30 ET for my live workshop: “Raising a Math-Confident Preschooler.”
If this topic speaks to you, I hope you’ll join me. And if you can’t attend live, a one-week recording will be available for everyone who signs up today. We'll explore what’s happening as 3-5 year old children learn math—and how to recognize the powerful potential for math learning that already exists in your everyday household moments.
Sign up here
Wrapping Up
Whether or not I see you over at Roots and Wings Math, I wish you many joyful discoveries as you read, count, and wonder together.
Warmly,
Erin
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!
June 18, 2025
Chris Wright
Chris@EarlyFamilyMath.org
Erin Wahler-Cleveland
erin@rootsandwingsmath.com
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Early Family Math is a California 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation, #87-4441486.