Math Talk Between Preschoolers and Their Mothers During A Home Cooking Activity

Parenting practices tend to influence young children's cognitive and academic skills development (Gregory and Rimm-Kaufman, 2008). Early forms of academic skills have been thought to be a result from everyday interactions and activities with parents at home, and this is true for early mathematics skills (Anderson, 1997; Tudge and Doucet, 2004). Unfortunately, a gap has been reported in the quality of stimulating interactions in home environments and parenting strategies between low-income children and their more affluent peers which seems to link to the gap in the level of early academic skills (Denton & West, 2002). The development of mathematical concepts starts to emerge during early childhood 2006). While available studies suggested the importance of parent-child interactions for children's early mathematical skills (Anderson, 1997; Tudge and Doucet, 2004), overall limited number of studies exists on math-related activities between parent and child; moreover, the available studies did not examine specific types of interactions or verbal behaviors that contributed to children's early mathematical skills; rather, they used the frequency of activities as a predictor. Studies illustrate that American children are less likely to be engaged in mathematical activities compared to literacy-related ones have higher mathematical skills when they had more opportunities to be involved in math-the parent and the child often tend to play with mathematics-related objects, or roles, which 2 contribute to children's math learning (Anderson, 1997),these studies focused on math activities in middle-income families, thus, not much information is available about math activities in low-income families. Further, these studies did not extensively investigate the nature of specific parent-child interactions during a math activity and the relative importance of different types of interactions to children's math development, which may suggest important mechanisms through which parents contribute to early mathematical development. Thus, the current study intends to examine specific types of math-related linguistic inputs from parents to their child and their links to mathematical development of children in low-income families in order to explain learning pathways to early mathematical development of at-risk low-income children. Young children start to develop mathematical knowledge nearly from birth to age 5. As children interact with the world around them, they start to develop everyday mathematics including informal ideas of more and less, taking away, shape, size, location, patterns and position (Ginsburg, Lee & Boyd, 2008). Given the fact that the early skills predict later academic achievement (Duncan et al., 2007), it is important to support children's early …