Your Child Can Understand Anything If You Start With This

Many struggle to understand maths or other concepts. Here is a way you can help anyone understand concepts and maths.

This struggle can be attributed to how they were taught concepts or introduced to mathematics.

I was in training recently and in the course of our discussion, a teacher asked a question, “Can we use pictures to teach in place of objects?”

Visit many preschools today and you will see pictures, charts, etc, displayed everywhere. 

Are these practices good? 

Yes. It has it merit but meaningful learning goes beyond see pictures. 

In the word of Leonard Peikoff  in his famous lecture "Teaching Johnny To Think"

“Man's knowledge begins at the perceptual level, with the use of the five senses. … The perceptual level is concerned with concrete.”

Wrong precepts will always lead to wrong concepts. It is pertinent to feed the minds of children with concrete experience.

The instructor turned to answer the question and made reference to a simple principle the Singaporean education system is using.

The principle is called CPA 

What is CPA? 

CPA is Concrete, Pictorial and Abstract 

He explained “when teaching children, start with concrete(objects, child - sized objects) then gradually move on to Pictorials(pictures) before abstract(use of imagination, explaining and describing)”

He continued “This is one method Singapore has deployed into her system that has lead to the massive results they have recorded.”

I was nodding my head while he was explaining. You can check out OECD and Google. Singapore is among the leading countries in the world especially in education.

This simple and powerful principle is also deployed in a Montessori prepared environment - by prepared environment, I mean an environment that has been prepared with the child in mind. An environment for the child.

How children learn and develop

Jean Piaget, the famous child psychologist cum educationists, gave us the stages of cognitive development that also explains how children learn and develop. The first stage is sensorimotor stage(birth -2years and preoperational stage 2-7years). Learning through their senses and movement. Constantly interacting with their environment. 

Maria Montessori explains the Absorbent mind, the child’s ability to absorb information effortlessly by just being in an environment. The also confirmed the importance of movements in the child’s learning and development.

Like Piaget, Maria Montessori discovered that children have the capacity to take in information effortlessly and they do this unconsciously and consciously using their senses. The senses(sight, taste, touch, smell and sound) are the primary ways we take in information; because the child’s capacity to think outside what he or she is seeing, touching, feeling, hearing, or tasting (imagination) is not yet developed, the first thing we must do to help the child form concept is to provide CONCRETE MATERIAL(Things they can touch, see, feel, hear or taste). Wrong concept will lead to wrong precept. 

If a child is told a cup is pot, he will grow up calling cup, pot.

When the child has absorbed the concrete materials(you can do this using 3 period lesson) learning is now extended to pictures then, the last step, abstract. 

These 3 steps is used in teaching mathematics in preschool (you provide concrete experience, abstract then you link the two - concrete and abstract)

It’s very important as caregivers we take care when doing these. A mistake in any of the steps can hinder what the child has learned. 

Emmanuel Ogabidu