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Step 1
Use picture books to teach one of the most basic math skills: identifying shapes. As you read to students, point out various shapes in the illustrations. Provide each child with an envelope of brightly colored cardboard shapes. While reading a story, point out that a giraffe's hat, for example, is triangular and ask them to find their triangles and hold them up. Alternately, ask students to hold onto their circles and to wait until they see something with a round shape and then hold up their circles.
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Step 2
Teach counting with picture books. Young children respond well to colorfully illustrated counting books; some favorites include Seymour Chwast's "The 12 Circus Rings," Betsy Lewin's "Cat Count" and Selby Beeler's "How Many Elephants." However, you can reinforce counting skills using virtually any storybook by counting all kinds of incidental items in picture book illustrations. For example, a book with a city setting will provide windows to count. A book like "Dr. Suess's ABC" will give kids the chance to count letters on the page ("How many Cs?" for example), reinforcing both counting and letters.
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Step 3
Find opportunities for trying out simple addition and subtraction problems in storybooks. For example, if Curious George is eating an ice cream cone with three scoops, how many will be left when he's eaten the first scoop? Or, how many things did the Very Hungry Caterpillar eat altogether? Make up funny brainteasers by combining elements from different books. For example, what number do you get if you add together the number of bears in the Goldilocks story with the number of Cinderella's stepsisters minus the number of feathers in Peter Pan's hat?
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Step 4
Hand out rulers and storybooks for the purpose of teaching measuring skills. Just how big is Clifford the Big Red Dog, you might ask, in comparison to the smallest child in the book? Ask kids to make a purple line on paper like one Harold made ("Harold and the Purple Crayon") and then measure it. Let kids make a Thomas the Train engine from construction paper and make enough cars to equal 12 inches.
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Step 5
Introduce math concepts like telling time and using a calendar by discussing the idea of story settings. Help kids make paper plate clocks with movable hands and keep these handy for use when they're reading. For example, in "Goodnight Moon," we are obviously talking about night. Talk about 9:00 and how that could be either morning or evening. In any of the books in the Junie B. Jones series, Junie has adventures at all times, day or night. Decide with children what time she is leaving for school and have them set their clocks; then, when she comes home, they can change the time.
