New App Helps Teach Maths To Babies As Young as Six Months

A maths education expert says it is “critical” children know basic maths skills before preschool and has praised the new Baby Mathletics app for babies as young as six months.

This comes after records showed that Australia continues to slide in global numeracy rankings.

The Courier Mail reported that Australian 15-year-olds were more than two years behind their Singaporean counterparts in maths in the latest Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development PISA results.

While the results from the NAPLAN testing shows a similar decline and there were no significant improvement in Australian students numeracy skills since the tests were introduced in 2008.

Now, parents are now being encouraged to take up the app to give their babies some fundamental maths skills.

The Courier Mail reported that the Baby Mathletics app is the first in a series of apps for toddlers in the Mathletics range, a popular online resource used by many schools as a teaching tool.

In an interview with the Courier Mail, Dr Kate Reid, from the Australian Council of Education Research said that parents and early childhood educators are under a “general misunderstanding” that learning maths should only start at school.

“Parents generally are good at encouraging early literacy skills but early numeracy skills don’t get embedded in quite the same way,” she said, adding that learning basic maths concepts is crucial to later success.

However, many parents didn’t like the idea of exposing a six-month-old to an app, with one father saying: “Infants need lots of human contact by loving parents, socializing, verbal interaction and learning to behave by boundary setting.”

Another parent said toddlers should be kept away from screens and instead, use books for learning, while another said: “Oh get real! Let babies be babies. ”

Source: Kidspot.com.au