From a baby who keeps adding fruit to her mother's shopping basket ( Baby Goes to Market) to a child trying to fall asleep by counting sheep ( Sheep Won't Sleep ), this

year's picture book winners of The Mathical Book Prize combine counting skills with real-world experiences in an engaging, whimsical way.

Since 2015, this prize has been awarded by the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) in partnership with the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) and The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM). Click here for a complete list of "mathy" winners through the years.

The holiday season offers many opportunities to connect math at school with children's experiences at home, says the Erikson Early Math Collaborative. As an example, they suggest reading Feast for 10 about a family shopping and cooking for a holiday meal. "A familiar, math-rich context like grocery shopping promotes children to think about key grade-level concepts. In preschool, children can make a list of foods for a celebration and represent the quantities with drawings...In kindergarten, children need a lot of opportunities to compose and decompose the benchmark number 10. So you can ask them to [draw 10] of their family's favorite foods in a shopping cart." Read more.

Want to know more about math in early childhood? Check out the new "bulletin board" on the Erikson Early Math web site. It brings together not just their newsletters and blog posts, but also information from other resources such as AIMS Center for Math and Science Education and Math at Home.

In the early years, math learning at school works best when it is connected to familiar experiences for children (see article above, for example). So, says the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), it's important to take students' language and culture into account.

An article by Karen Nemeth includes case studies that bring this concept to life. In one, a girl with limited English doesn't understand what the teacher is talking about and just copies the activity the other children are doing--leading to little or no meaningful learning. In another, a teacher takes the time to attempt a couple of key words in his students' home language--leading to a successful activity in sorting and comparing socks.

To plan meaningful math activities for a diverse class, Nemeth's advice for teachers includes asking yourself how people use this skill in real life. "Counting cups for snack time or counting the number of children playing in the block area gives children the sense of the value of counting even if they don't know all of the vocabulary yet." Read more.

Also from NAEYC: a list of three recommended books that encourage children to count, along with related activities for your classroom. For example, if you read Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed, you may have children use stick puppets to act out the story. Then after each verse you can ask: "How many monkeys are still on the bed?" Read more.

Most free online resources are for classroom activities with young learners; here's something different from Development and Research in Early Math Education (DREME) at Stanford. It's a collection of handouts designed for use with adults. 

For example, "Counting for Adults" outlines an activity to use with teachers to help them understand the complexity of learning 1-2-3-4-5. "What Children Need to Know About Shape and Space" is an in-depth description of geometry and spatial relations. Read more.

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