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Mathematical concepts present themselves easily throughout the day.  As you are walking down the street your child may notice that there are more people on one side of the street than another.  You may see a line at the grocery store.  Does one line have more people standing in it?  Does one line have less people?  Which line should we go in?  How many items can we have in this checkout line? Do we have less than ten items? All these questions occur naturally on a daily basis.  Be sure to verbalize what you are thinking so your child sees the same things.  Ask him the questions.  See what he notices naturally as you are going through the day.

Along with natural number talk you can help your child’ improve his math concepts with a simple deck of cards. There are many card games that you can play with your four year old.  One of the easiest games that my own children enjoyed playing was a game we called “Bigger Number”.  You may also know of it as the game of “War” but I didn’t particularly care for that title so my kids dubbed it “Bigger Number” which is quite fitting.  When I played with my four year old, I took out the face cards (Jacks, Queens and Kings) and we only focused on the number cards.  To play the game you spilt the deck in half.  Each of you lay down one card.  Whoever has the bigger number wins the cards. If there is a tie (which is super exciting) you lay one card face down, and the next card face up and the higher card wins them all!  This continues  until you are out of cards in your pile.  Then we stacked our winning cards up in a pile (good fine motor skill) and matched them next to each other to see which deck was higher which meant that person had more cards and they were the winner! 

Another fun game that young children will enjoy is the classic game of “Go Fish”.  I always made a variation to use less numbers to make the game more manageable for the young ones.  It’s difficult for little hands to hold the cards in their hands so I liked to star with four or five cards per person instead of seven.  Holding the cards with their non-dominant hand and using their dominant hand to pull a card out is a perfect way to strengthen small muscles and increase hand-eye coordination.  In the game of “Go Fish” you are looking to find matches.  You look at your hand and say, “Do you have any threes?” If your friend has a three she gives them to you and if not you go fish (pick a card from the pile).  The game continues as each player takes turns trying to find a complete set of four matching numbers.  The first player to unload all of his cards wins.

You can always research for card games that you can play with your young children.  There are tons of games available to play with a simple deck of cards.  You’ll both enjoy the game equally, your child will be learning mathematical concepts and it’s a great way to pass the time.