The introduction of numbers is an important foundation in learning mathematics. At a very early stage, a child begins to learn mathematics from his parents. For many parents, teaching mathematics to their children is "easy-to-difficult". Why? because a child can often have an interest or interest in other areas and not math. Some parents will be tempted to quickly introduce mathematics to their children. Of course this is not a mistake as far as the child shows a strong interest in learning math and this can produce a good thing in the future. However, if a child with less interest in learning mathematics gets excessive encouragement from the moment he is small, it is not impossible that the opposite happens that he will grow up as a man who hates mathematics. It is fitting that learning for the child is to be a fun and enjoyable thing to do. This is actually the first skill that we should try to cultivate when teaching anything to our children, that is the love of learning something.
Let's learn together here, as parents to teach math to our children. What we are saying here is just one of many ways to start introducing numbers to children. It may be said, there is no one way that becomes the most powerful way to teach mathematics to a child. The way that one can work for a child, but the same way may not work for another child. That is the challenge in teaching mathematics to children.
From experience we introduce numbers to children, we start with the simple thing. Incidentally, our son likes buses (public buses or school buses). Every time he's on the road and seeing the bus, he'll always say, it's a public bus, it's a school bus. From his introduction and his fondness for the bus, we began to ask him to count how many buses he was seeing. We taught him that in counting, there are numbers, starting from one, two, three and so on. At first he still did not grasp the intent (concept) of arithmetic, when he was asked to count the number of buses he saw, he instead often started not from one, but from other numbers like five, six and so on. From here, we realize that the concept of the sequence of numbers for a child is a very abstract thing. We are not desperate and always try to find a way to introduce numbers to him. Until there was one moment when he was playing train-cart toy on the table, he said, "daddy, look, there are four train!". Then we saw on the table that it was true there were four toys train. So it seems, he began to grasp the idea of numbers.
Again, there are so many ways. One easy and can be done at home when introducing numbers to children is to use objects that are around, such as fruit, toys, and so on. This approach is an attempt to create a concrete (concrete) example for the child. Well, once they understand the number examples, then we begin to enter the way of writing number symbols. In the past, this can usually be helped by writing over letters or numbers marked with dots or dashed lines where the child is asked to write by connecting the dots. It is certainly good and useful to familiarize the eye coordination and hand gestures in writing the symbols of these numbers. Surely all this takes time and again, between one child and another may be different. The most important thing here is how we see the child's interest in progress or progress when he is learning a thing
