Playing With Blocks Can Improve Math Skills in Kids

Our 18-month to 3-year-old’s are learning a variety of skills when playing with blocks that help to lay a strong foundation for their future math knowledge.
When your 18-month-old attempts to stack blocks, experimenting with how different shapes fit (or don’t fit) on top of each other, how they balance (or don’t balance), and looks to you to help understand what’s happening, you are creating a rich interaction that is boosting her physical development, her cognitive and spatial reasoning skills to plan the tower, and her language and social skills as she asks you for help. All of these lay a strong foundation as her block play advances. As she approaches the preschool years, her play starts incorporating more advanced concepts — she may be able to copy your patterns, and may pick up on patterns and sequences of blocks and guess what might come next.
A recent Vanderbilt University study found that these patterning and spatial skills were unique predictors of children’s math knowledge, most likely because “patterning skills involve deducing underlying rules in the sequences of objects, and may also promote some counting skills…Developing such skills with repeating patterns at a young age may support their noticing and use of patterns and rules in numbers as they acquire basic numeracy knowledge.”
Read more here: http://bit.ly/blocksandmathskills.
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