DREME (Development and Research in Early Mathematics Education) is a network of scholars across the United States who engage in collaborative research to promote mathematics teaching and learning and executive functioning skills. They have developed lots of great resources that can be used to support children’s math throughout the day and in a variety of settings:

• Center Time activities that are mathematically rich, easy to set up, and require low to moderate teacher involvement across the following topics:
  • Addition and Subtraction
  • Data
  • Measurement
  • Number, Counting, & Cardinality
  • Patterns
  • Shapes
  • Spatial Relations

Each activity offers a list of materials (commonly found in classrooms), basic instructions, and questions to pose that help you check for child understanding across key concepts. Importantly, each activity comes with modifications to present less or more challenge, as well as ways to increase peer collaboration.

• Guided Activities introduce Whole Group activities that leads to Small Group work. Once children are familiar with the activity, they can play independently in Center Time.
• Math Moments are simple, mathematically rich activities explicitly designed to fit into routines and transitions. Although brief, these fun, playful moments accumulate, and children help to consolidate math concepts in low pressure interactions.
• Literacy helps incorporate math concepts into story time and storytelling. These reading guides will help you identify and highlight the math within stories, as well as help you build your library.

For example, if you’re teaching about geometric shapes, a guided activity is “What Shape Am I Touching?” This game gives children the time to explore shapes with their hands and not rely so much on their eyes. Finding Shapes in Food is a great way to build on the guided activity. A nice way to wrap up the day could be to read Ellen Stoll Walsh’s Mouse Shapes. This reading guide offers ideas about math talking points during the group read as well as follow-up activities.