TEACHING “MORE THAN, LESS THAN”: ONE MORE EARLY MATHEMATICAL  CONCEPT

           My son and I are working on learning a new mathematical concept and I thought it would be interesting to share it with you all.We are working to develop an understanding of concepts like "more than, greater than, less than" and other similar concept. 

           Often when we ask my son  if he wants 6 cookies or 3  cookies or whether he wants 4 cars or 5 cars, his answers are inconsistent.  We feel that he answers randomly and doesn’t clearly understand which numbers is greater. He gets it right sometime but  I suspect that it is often a lucky guess than a well thought out reply. As with everything else that we adults know, I think we tend to take it for granted that our children naturally understand the concept of "greater than or more than and less than". My experience with my son, however, reminded me that he needs to be taught this concept and he may not magically learn it, though I wish he would JJ

• A few weeks ago I came across this interesting book in the library. It is a book called “ More than, Less than” by Joanne Mattern. It has very interesting pictures to spur the interest of children in this concept and also gives us Moms interesting ideas on how to teach this concept to them.

• At the first stage, I would suggest that you  take numbers out of the learning equation. Give your child two groups of objects and ask them which is "more or greater." For example, you could give them 4 apples and 8 oranges . Ask them which is more or greater. Try to introduce them to both the words: more and greater.  Also you are also introducing them to different fruits.  With older kids, you could show them different sets of toys to work on this concept.   Here I want to introduce a word of caution. Just because your child understands which is more or greater, it doesn't  mean that they understand that  the other thing is naturally less. I suggest that you first teach the concept of  "more or greater" and then tackle the concept of "less than". 
• Once you feel that your child is beginning to understand the concept of more or greater, let us get numbers into the equation.  At this stage, you can again show them two sets of objects  and ask them which is greater.  We won’t stop here, though. Ask them to count the objects and write it on a piece of paper. For instance, let them count the 4 apples and write down 4 on a sheet of paper. Next ask them to count the oranges and write down 8 on papers. Now ask them  which is greater. They may tell you the right number or they may falter. There is still no way for us to really know whether they are guessing or correctly understanding the concept. Once my son tells me the answer, I again validate it by explaining that there are more oranges and hence 8 is greater than 4. My feeling is that as that if we do this repeatedly over a few days,  the children tend to  recognize and understand the pattern that greater is a number that follows a given number. I realized that at this point, I didn't want  to confuse my son  by bringing in the concept of recognizing  'lesser than" in terms of numbers. I made a basic activity sheet to work on this concept. I am still learning how I can insert printable worksheets. Till then, please bear with me JJ I am attaching a scanned copy of the worksheet for you to see. I always feel that when we make these worksheets rather than printing them, our children tend to believe that we did something extra special for them. The smile on their face is priceless, Try it!!!

• One way for us to reinforce this concept , is by giving our child cut out numbers like 3, 5 and 1  or any other random combination. Give your child, the number 3 and ask them which is greater than 3. Is it  5 or 1. I think this activity is best tried after  we have already worked on this concept for a little while. 
• Another thing that I recently did was to make a number line from 1 to 10.  I think it is easy for children to see which number comes after which number when they see a number line. 

I have just recently started working on this concept with my son. I may come across more ways to work on this concept and will share them with you.As always, share your views on how we can work on this concept or anything else that you would like to share.