The kids are screeching with delight as they roll tennis balls into empty water bottles, each bottle numbered in sequence. Is it bowling or a math game? It's both, part of a program called Number Ways, designed by FIU professor Charles Bleiker for pre-kindergarten children.
"To me this is like math vitamins, that they get a math multivitamin when we come in and teach these games. The other thing is, it's just a lot of fun," Bleiker said.
Bleiker and his team of graduate students teach the curriculum in several preschools in Miami, focusing on low-income, mostly immigrant four-year-olds. He said this is a crucial age to build math confidence, because without it, a devastating cascade of bad outcomes can happen down the road.
"One of the dangers we see is that because the kids don't think they can do math, especially with at-risk children, they don't go on to take higher math classes, they drop out, they see themselves as incapable of doing higher math," Bleiker explained. "The consequences are horrible, really, the consequences are terrible because if you can't do math in this world, you're not gonna get through high school, and this whole area of new job growth is not gonna be open to you. You're not gonna be in engineering, you're not gonna be in high tech."
The Number Ways program is designed to work by creating what they call a network of math knowledge within each child. Each part of this web is a stepping stone, with skills building upon each other, making strong foundations.
"We're learning number sequence but they're also visualizing it so that this becomes a tangible representation of number," Bleiker said, explaining one of the aspects of the program.
He and his team have been teaching Number Ways now for a few years, not long enough to compile enough information for an academic study but enough time to see anecdotal evidence of success.
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"We've seen children who've been in this program, two years later, they come back and they absolutely love math. Parents say it's his favorite subject, the teachers think that they're really bright and essentially it's because they've had some of these early interventions," Bleiker said. "We need these kids to be engineers, we need these kids to be doctors and chemists and architects, because they are our future."
The best part about Number Ways may be that it's almost as simple as two plus two. It can be done at home or at any preschool.
FIU has instructional videos to teach the basics of the program online. Click here to view.
