Math for Infants

While they may look helpless, newborns arrive hard-wired to perceive quantity and magnitude as well as spatial relationships, regularity, and sequence.

The emerging (birth to 14 months) stage (Implicit)

Following are the early math concepts of developmental trajectories for Infants: 

• Sensing Attributes:
  The five senses of the baby, enables him/her to perceive the properties of qualities of the elements around. Although infants cannot explicitly know or describe the attributes of their encounters, these characteristics help them classify and, in the process, make sense of the world around. Infants see everything as falling largely into two large categories:

– What they like because it makes them feel comfortable and safe or
– What they dislike because it makes them feel uncomfortable and unsafe.

Eg: The breast milk is warm and comforting; the loud sound of the whistle makes the infant uneasy.

• Notice & Compare:
  Matching, sorting, ordering and problem-solving is their natural way to notice the sameness and differences amongst various attributes.

Eg: All the red balloons are on the floor and all the blue balloons are in the basket;
My nappies are kept on the cabinet and my clothes are inside the cabinet.

• Pattern Prediction:
  A recurring set of Rhythm, Sequence and Regularity defines the elements in a pattern. With the regularity in sequence there is an expectation in the pattern, which a baby gradually gets a hang of.

Eg: Clap on “hurray” in the rhyme;
My blanket has stripes: pink, white, pink, white, pink, white

• Change:
  Qualitative or quantitative differences may occur owing to joining, separating, or of transforming of substances. The ability to recognize the difference between the initial condition and the changed condition allows young children to respond to change.

Eg: Stranger Anxiety is one of the foremost displays of identifying parents from strangers;
It is dark outside now, time for daddy to be home.

Even though the concepts are present at birth, they will not automatically mature into scientifically sound mathematical knowledge and understanding without adequate support from adults (NRC, 2009)