Little Mr. started the Elephant Learning math program at 4.5 years old, and 4 months later my 4 year old was doing 9 year old math questions!
Why I chose Elephant Learning despite the fact it was computer-based
Up until this point I had been purposely staying away from computer based learning programs, always opting for more hands on learning for my toddlers (even for activities chosen to prepare him for computer programming, which his Daddy wants to teach him later). But I was struggling to come up with a suitable math activity for the Little Mr. to help him figure out equations in his activity book (eg. 3 + ___ = 5), and when I came across Elephant Learning, claiming to have 4 year old's doing division, my curiosity was peaked (just like it was for Jim's Reading Program that could teach 2.5 year old's to read). I happened to already have a Microsoft Surface that has a touchscreen, so I wouldn't have to teach him how to use a mouse and keyboard yet. So when he was 4.5 I decided to try this Elephant Learning Program, and not only did he love it, it made his understanding of math skyrocket!
As the Little Mr. was 4.5 to start the Elephant Learning program, the program started off by giving him math questions that the average 3.5 year old could do. By the end of the first session, he was doing math questions that other 4 year old's could do, and by the end of the first week he was doing math problems that the average 6 year old could do! 4 months later, at age 4 years and 10 months, he seems to have plateaued at math problems a 9 year old can do, but I'm still incredibly happy with his results:
Helping my toddler progress in Elephant Learning using 5-minute activities
Elephant Learning ended up replacing our Math activity, and I created another activity to help with whatever he was struggling with at Math at the time. So when he was just starting the Elephant Learning program and it asked him to figure out what numbers were on a number line from 1-100 (and later to 1000), I created a "Counting" activity to help him. When it started to ask about groups of numbers, the Counting activity morphed into me showing how to find groups of numbers in a number square for the questions testing multiplication concepts. I think what shocked me the most was to hear the program ask my 4 year old about fractions and then percentages. When it started to ask him about fractions, I used the Counting activity to come up with a way to help a 4 year old understand fractions. I would never have even thought to try teaching my toddler how to get two-fifths of 15, and here he is at 4 years and 10 months able to do it:
(The Elephant Learning program didn't teach him to use Connect 4 to solve the problem - that was just one way I taught him how to figure it out himself).
Once he could consistently figure out fractions on his own, I tried to think of different ways to teach my 4 year old percentages (this one is the toughest one so far! I'll update the Math posts with an activity if/when I find one that works!).
Importance of language in Math
What Elephant Learning understood that I didn't when I originally tried to teach my son hands on learning with Math is the importance of language used in math. The math symbols ("+", "=", "-") were so alien to my son: even when explained what each symbol meant as we worked through my first tries at creating 5-minute math activities, he still didn't quite get it. So Elephant Learning uses only worded questions, and displays the actual equation it was asking the child to solve only after the child has gotten that question wrong or right. But it displays the equation only with no explanation as to what each symbol means. This is good in the sense that the child will probably have a hard time understanding it anyway, but it still didn't help him do the equations in his activity book, which was my ultimate goal for starting to work on math with him.
So as a 4 year old at a 9 year old math level, he understood the mathematical concepts that a 9 year old could, but the format of an equation (eg. the numbers with the "+", "=", and "-"signs) was still a little alien to him because he was used to worded problems from the Elephant Learning Program. So when we tried the equations in activity book when his math level was that of a 9 year old, it had been about 4 months since we had worked on equations with my initial attempts at a math activity, and he didn't quite understand even simple equations until I explained it in words instead. So for the equation: 2 + ___ = 4, he didn't understand it by just looking at the equation, though we had gone over what the plus and equals sign meant 3-4 months ago. I had to ask him, "If I have 2 of something, and I need 4, how many more do I need? "Then he said, "2!". Or for the equation: 5 - ___ = 2, I needed to say, if I have 5, what do I need to do to get 2? Immediately he said, "Take away 3!". So he clearly understands the mathematical concepts (which is exactly what Elephant Learning is trying to teach), but equations are still alien to him. So I added simple equations to his "Counting" activities (coming soon) to help him equate the equations with the word problems he was used to.
At what age is it worth it to start the Elephant Learning program?
Even though Elephant Learning is advertised for kids as young as 2, I'm not sure I would have started if I had just a 2 year old. I found out about it when my eldest was 4.5 and my youngest was 2.5. We saw immediate improvement with our 4 year old, but our 2 year old didn't quite get it at first so we just let him do a question every now and then just to see where his understanding was, and once he started to get better at counting consistently (when he was about 2 years and 10 months), I started to work with him to do a a couple of questions per day, but I still don't think it would have been worth it if I had been doing the program with just my 2 year old. 3 years old might be the sweet spot, so I'll update this once we see how Copycat does with the program when he turns 3. One of the biggest hurdles I had when deciding whether or not to try Elephant Learning was the cost, but I found a Groupon for several months which ultimately made me decide to try it in the first place.
Activity length and interface
This is technically longer than a 5-minute activity because the Elephant Learning Program recommends 10 minutes per day. Little Mr. started doing this activity for 10 minutes per day, but when he started asking for more time doing Math, because we were paying for it and it would come to an end at some point (and the fact that he was really enjoying an educational activity), I allowed him to spend more than 10 minutes a day on his math activity (it was his favorite one by far, though potentially that was because it was his only computer based activity).
An arguable downside to Elephant Learning is the touchscreen interface: there wasn't a way to take away objects on the screen using just your fingers - the computer mouse had to be used. While this was inconvenient in the beginning (because in case the Little Mr. ever put too many objects on the screen, he'd need to call me to remove one), it ended up being a good thing because he got practice using a computer mouse at 4 years old. Because teaching him to program is our eventual goal, this computer skill would have needed to be taught at some point anyway.
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