July 2025
Welcome to EFM's June Newsletter!
Read, Count, Play – Every Child, Every Day!
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
Donations – We are very pleased to celebrate that we received a $5,000 donation and then a second $5,000 matching donation this month. This makes a huge difference in helping us create and provide free materials to families and educators around the world. Please consider making a large, or small, donation to EFM.
ESM Focus Groups – We are recruiting educators to help us improve the beta version of our Early School Math (ESM) app. After members of this group work with the app, we want their feedback through small group discussions. As a thank you, we’ll send each member two EFM playing card decks or a Math for Love game of their choice. Please help us improve this free resource by contacting us.
New EFM Tagline: Read, Count, Play – Every Child, Every Day! We wanted something quick that captures the majority of our mission. No seven words can capture it all, but we like that this captures so much and is catchy.
Early School Math (ESM)
Why is EFM Doing ESM?
We believe it will be incredibly helpful for early math teachers to have a free tool that that can act as a mentor and resource that is always available on their phone. We see the following needs:
Teachers with no math ed experience, training, or resources
Assistant teachers or after school aides needing ideas
Teachers with too many resources and too little time to find what they need
Teachers with experience who want to find new ideas
We want to provide these teachers with a useful tool with some best practices and valuable resources that are easy to look up and use.
Please Help Us
We need feedback! Please volunteer to try out the ESM app and discuss with us what its strengths and weaknesses are. We want this to be a great resource for all teachers, and we can’t do that without your help. Please contact us.
Design Philosophy
One team member described our approach as “quick and dirty and to the point.” We do not need anyone’s official approval, so we are not bogged down by bureaucratic requirements. We want everything to be as brief as possible while still delivering all the important information. We have lots of resources, be we keep them off to the side where they are easy to find but not in the way. We want to include and support low-resource communities, so our material does not rely on things being printed out or on having a bunch of stuff.
Central to the app is a list of all the early math topics (currently PreK to Grade 2). The description of each topic is kept to just two or three phone screens. Additional information is one or two button clicks away, but they do not obscure the main narrative of the topic. At the bottom of each topic page you can click on a button, the “Resource Finder,” that will take you to all the resources in the app that are associated with that topic.
The Latest Version
The app is not currently available for download as a mobile app. However, you can download the app into a browser window on your phone or laptop. The following link always points to the latest version of ESM:
https://early-school-math.web.app/template/home_screen.
This is a work in progress and we are a small team. In every section there are more materials and illustrations we haven’t added yet, and material that deserves further editing. There are ideas that are not fully developed, and other ideas overlooked that need to be added. There are some screens that load more slowly than we would like (please be patient). If you would like to be involved in improving the material, I encourage you to contact us.
Tour of the ESM App
This tour starts on our home page. There you will find three things:
Introduction
Topics
Resources
Introduction
The introduction gives a soft entry point to the app. It goes through some sample uses of all the material, and it describes the sections of the app.
Topics
Topics are the heart of this app. The topics are laid out hierarchically, from high level strands, to midlevel themes, to the bottom level topics. Should you want to view the topics as part of a different standards system, on the Topics Page you can choose the view you prefer. At the moment you can choose among 4 views: ESM, Common Core (CCSSM), Texas (TEKS), and Australia (AC9M). If you select CCSSM, TEKS, or AC9M, all the resources will be labeled with their associated standards. More views are coming soon.
Each topic has a straightforward and short description. We also add in drop-downs with related information such as useful teaching tips, ideas to highlight, and common student mistakes. At the bottom of each entry there are three items:
Related Topics – topics that come immediately before or after this one
Resources – the Resource Finder lists all the resources associated with this topic
Glossary – This brings up phrases in the glossary associated with this topic. If none were flagged, it brings up the whole glossary.
Resources
The Resource Finder tool is one way to explore individual resources in the app. If you wish to go to a whole category within the Resources, such as Dot Talks, then the Resources page is the way to get there. Within Resources we have the following individual categories:
Resource Finder – You can go to the Resource Finder from each topic page, or you can go to it directly from the Resources page. Select a list of topics you are interested in, and the Resource Finder will give you a list of resources associated with at least one of those topics.
Instructional Routines – These are 1- to 10-minute classroom routines. We have about a dozen different types of these routines.
Rich Tasks – These tasks take 1 to 3 classes to cover and go deeply into a topic or problem area. These are split into Open-Ended Tasks and Problem Solving Tasks.
Puzzles – Some of the EFM Puzzles of the Week.
Games – Some of the EFM Math Games for Classrooms.
Storybooks – These are the 58 annotated EFM storybooks.
Glossary – This has an explanation of about 135 mathematical phrases
Example: Using the App – Learning About Subitizing
That was a brief overview of the pieces of the app. The following is an example to give you a sense of what it’s like to use the app.
Suppose you are a teacher who heard someone talking about subitizing and you wanted to learn more. Here are the options for how you could use the ESM app to do that.
Use the topic page
Assuming you are using the ESM view, go to the Topics page and look at the high level strands and explore "Number & Place Value." Within that strand, subitizing involves small quantities, so you select "Quantities & Counting to 10." There you see the button for the topic "Subitizing to 10."
On the “Subitizing to 10” page you will find discussions of the importance of subitizing, its relationship to unitizing, beginning standard dot arrangements to use, the use of ten frames, and its link to Counting On. There is also a tip about five frames being not so useful for subitizing.
At the bottom of this topic page you will find (as mentioned earlier):
A pull down list of Related Topics. At the moment, this list displays 2 topics that come before this topic, and 5 topics that are natural next steps;
A link to the Resource Finder. This will search for resources related to subitizing. At the moment it finds 3 games and 11 routines.
Go to the Glossary, which starts by displaying phrases for Counting On, Subitizing, Ten Frames, and Unitizing.
Use the Resource Finder:
Use the dropdown menus near the top of the page to select topics you wish to search on. Those menus are the same as the ones you see on the Topics page. Listed at the bottom of the page are all the resources in the app that are associated with the topics you have selected so far.
As in the "Topics" example above, suppose you navigate to the "Quantities and Counting to 10" Theme, and then pick the "Subitizing to 10" topic to add to your search list. Additionally, to broaden the search in that same general topic area, suppose you also add the topic "Quantities and Counting" to the list of search topics.
The search results show all the resources related to at least one of those two topics. You can now choose from:
26 Puzzles
13 Games
27 Storybooks
11 Routines
9 Open-Ended Tasks
Use the Glossary:
The “subitizing” entry has a short description of subitizing, an example, and a discussion of its importance and relationship to unitizing. At the bottom of this entry, you can select "Related Topics" to find further information about it. At the moment, this only lists the topic "Subitizing to 10."
Use the Instructional routines:
The Instructional Routines are currently grouped into three levels:
Shapes and Properties
Small Quantities and Counting
Numbers and Operations
Since you are interested in subitizing, you select "Small Quantities and Counting." There you find:
Dot Talks – Beginning
Splat!
Number Paths – Number Lines
Choral Counting
Short Games – Counting
The first two of these provide many examples to give you ideas for running activities that involve subitizing. The next two have counting and sequencing activities. The last has five suggested games that involve counting, and a button to take you to the Games section.
Wrapping Up
I hope you feel this is a worthy project that you would like to see succeed. We would love to have your help in developing the content or in giving feedback about the content. Please contact us and work with us to help early math teachers around the world!
Next month we’ll be writing about one math educator’s work on providing great resources to her local community.
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!
July 18, 2025
Chris Wright
Chris@EarlyFamilyMath.org
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Early Family Math is a California 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation, #87-4441486.