Content Area IID: Promoting Cognitive Development: Mathematics

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Level 1
Level 2
Level 3
Level 4
Level 5

Level 1

• Encourages children to explore, group, and order objects and materials in the environment.
• Provides opportunities for conversation using everyday words to indicate space, location, shape, and size of objects

Level 2

• Discusses the sequence of daily and special family or community events.
• Provides opportunities to develop an understanding of space (e.g., filling and emptying, building, observing from different viewpoints).
• Shares children’s progress and achievements in mathematics learning with families

Level 3

• Provides opportunities for children to use simple strategies to solve mathematical problems.
• Encourages beginning understanding of number and quantity (e.g., counting footsteps, jumps, or repetitions of exercises; commenting there are more girls than boys at the table).
• Facilitates children’s recognition and description of shapes (e.g., identifying a triangle and counting its sides; identifying and labeling shapes found in the environment).
• Encourages children’s interest in measuring activities (e.g., measuring the length of a block road or height of a block tower; noting that they can fill a large bowl in the sand table with three small cups of sand).
• Provides sensory experiences that encourage children to practice changes in structure, shape, and size of substances (e.g., building structures with blocks or Lego toys).
• Encourages and offers simple parent-child activities with number and quantity.

Level 4

• Provides opportunities for children to sort objects into subgroups that vary by one or two attributes (e.g., sorting markers from crayons; sorting buttons and pegs into egg cartons; sorting pattern blocks according to shape and color).
• Provides opportunities for children to recognize simple patterns and duplicate them (e.g., copying a sound pattern of two claps and a pause, then one clap and a pause; stringing beads in a repeating pattern according to color, shape, or size).
• Facilitates children’s understanding and use of several positional words (e.g., putting a block on top of or underneath another block; going in front of or behind another child; standing inside or outside of a playhouse).
• Provides opportunities for children to order, compare, and describe objects according to a single attribute (e.g., figuring out who of two children has the smaller piece of sandwich; arranging three blocks from shortest to longest).

Level 5

• Analyzes, evaluates, and applies current research and theory and research on mathematics teaching and learning.
• Includes emphasis on practical strategies for mathematics teaching and learning in staff development programs