Ask HN: How did you teach your baby children to count? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How did you teach your baby children to count?

5 pointsherodoturtle18 comments

Dad here, young baby, crowd-sourcing tips and insights.

Happy holidays everyone.

Don't overthink it! I've found counting and going through the alphabet at bedtime to relax, but they will get it eventually whatever you do. My son has always been fairly reluctant to read and write (he's 6) and all of a sudden he can read books at his age above and write several pages of text. It happened so quickly that I'm not conscious of anything in particular we did, he just levelled up developmentally.

Honestly, just count everything. My wife would make games out of counting white cars or VW Bugs or garbage trucks on the road.

Later, it transitioned into number facts. Our little guy was comfortable with basic multiplication in kindergarten/1st grade and seems to have a real intuitive sense of numbers. It was awesome when he “discovered” division on his own by subtracting.

Each kid is different, but whatever makes numbers a natural thing and not something to be feared is a win.

Every evening, I'd count slowly (~1-2Hz) and continuously until my son was asleep. It worked both to teach counting and to help him settle - even on nights where he fought going to sleep he'd usually be out by 200.

With 2/3 of my kids, I'm the one who's out first. The kids get excited and I end up having to go to 500.

start with single tone monkey grunt, bump up to double tone with grunt variation on the incrememt, and grouping. then add complexity of grunts for mathmatical operations, and sliiide into phonetics by teaching them each phoneme as a number "from 44-329?" then introduce positional alpha/numer/symbol systems with enhancing complexity based on relevant daily task implimentation for activity description and/or teem logic building

I count every step I go down the stairs with them. Count whenever you put food in their bowl. Just play with them, count with fingers or pebbles.

This is the way to go. Stairs counting And Steps counting are awesome way to make them fall in love with numbers. Also, while on a walk, tell them what is what like these are stairs, that is a donkey etc. despite they can utter it or not. One more comes to my mind, tell the spelling while looking at the things like if there is ice cream written somewhere, say it like I C E C R E A M.

Kids just love spelling random things, it's like playing a video game for them. My kids have trouble sitting still when putting on their clothes, so I ask them what's on their shirt, what's on my shirt. You can start easy like colors, or animals. They recognise letters well too as long as the font isn't weird. My 13 month old can't talk yet, but he will point to letters if I ask him "Where's A?"

I bought a bunch of picture books for children which are for counting. Repetition is also a key, I try to read the books every day before sleep.

Ten Terrible Dinosaurs is the one I remember reading regularly when my child was little.

But it was just another book we read.

A bowl of twenty oranges. I made the child say the number out loud as they moved oranges from one bowl to another one at a time.

The count... Seriously though, like another poster said, repetition is key. They eventually develop context around it as well.

Songs are probably the easiest.

Anything musical will stick — I can attest to that! I don’t recall how we taught our oldest to count but for the other seven the older siblings have been eager to help teach the younger ones what they know (both the good and the bad).

Incredible, if i'm reading this right (tired eyes, kids were up all night), you have 8 children?

Curious if you have any words of wisdom to share around managing daily life with that many kids?

I don't know about it being wisdom but this is a rough outline:

1. Have a schedule. 2. Do your best to stick to it. 3. Have a sense of humor and don't treat kids like mini-adults when things go wrong (schedule-wise or otherwise). 4. Enjoy being with them -- they will be grown and gone before you know it.

One thing that's possible with several/many kids is coopetition between the groups (can the boys get their schoolwork done before the girls? can the younger kids get their after-meal chores done before the older ones?). We also home-school and this is a great opportunity to teach delayed gratification (eg: do you want to take your recess now at 09:45 or keep working and get all of your schoolwork done by 1pm and have THE REST of the day free to play?). Kids don't really "get" delayed gratification at first so you do need to over-incentivize it but as they begin to build the habit of "work hard, play hard" you don't have to dangle as many carrots to encourage them. My older kids try to get their work done early so they can do "revenue jobs" for the neighbors (mowing grass in the summer, raking leaves in the fall, shoveling snow in the winter). None of this is direct advice for others; one thing having several kids has taught me is how different each of them are by personality. If I only had one or two kids I think the differences in personality between them and me is something I would perceive as an issue of some sort but with eight I realize it's just a personality difference. I could go on but I'll stop before this becomes a wall-of-text reply.

Thank you for replying, and for the nuggets of wisdom!

Merry Christmas!

The funky, fabulous Sesame Street Pinball Number Count song (All segments) ft. the Pointer Sisters (1976)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IC7l3V1nhWc

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