One state bets on parents to boost preschool math skills

TAYLORSVILLE, Utah — In an elementary school classroom just outside Salt Lake City, Clarence Ames warmed up an audience of 15 parents, their young children sitting beside them.

“Has anybody here ever heard or said, ‘I’m not a math person?’” asked Ames, who leads research and implementation for the Utah STEM Action Center, a state agency tasked with advancing science and math education. Most hands went up.

Ames talks to a lot of Utah parents of preschoolers, he told the group at Plymouth Elementary School. And when he mentions the importance of parents doing math with their kids, he said, he is often met with deer-in-the-headlights looks. Then those parents end up sharing their math trauma stories with him.

“Because we all have one, right?” asked Ames. Laughter and nods.

The STEM Action Center is trying to ease that dread. Ames’ outreach is part of a center project called MILO & Friends, meant to encourage parents to start talking about math with their young children.

Parents often think they’re not qualified to do math with their kids, he told the group, and believe they should leave that instruction to teachers once their kids reach kindergarten. But practicing math even before children start school is “super important” and parents are a child’s best first teacher, he said.

At the end of his presentation, Ames introduced a cooperative math game called Happy Bunny that gets kids practicing simple math skills. Each parent grabbed a copy from a table and headed off to play a round with their children in the next room.

The event was set up by the Granite School District’s family engagement program. Designed to strengthen ties between families and schools, the program has partnered with the action center to hold these sessions for the last three years.

Ames, who calls himself an early math evangelist, said after the session that he talks to parents of young kids any chance he gets, including in the grocery store checkout line. “I tell people I’m looking for converts.”

Related: A little parent math talk with kids might really add up

Providing a strong foundation in math is essential to cutting the achievement gap between students from rich and poor families, researchers say. But only a handful of programs around the country focus on encouraging parents to do their part to build those skills in their children — a notable absence compared to efforts to promote early literacy.

Nationally, the news on math achievement is dire. Last September, the board governing the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the Nation’s Report Card, said that the gap in average math scores between the highest and lowest-performing students in 12th-grade math was wider than in any year dating back to at least 2005. Average fourth-, eighth- and 12th-grade math scores in 2024 sank below 2019 levels. Just 33 percent of 12th graders were academically prepared for entry-level college math coursework in 2024, down from 37 percent in 2019.

By kindergarten, Black and Hispanic children, as well as children from low-income families, are disproportionately represented among those with low math skills, said Stanford University professor emerita Deborah Stipek.

“For anyone who’s serious about trying to reduce the achievement gap, it’s very clear that you need to start before children enter school,” said Stipek, founder of a network of scholars focused on early math development.

Entering kindergarten with strong math skills can be life-changing. Mastering skills such as counting and arithmetic early predicts math performance throughout school and is linked to higher rates of college enrollment. In turn, students with better math skills in school earn more on average as adults.

Inspired by that research, five years ago Ames contacted a program in Washington state that was running a public engagement campaign for parents on early math. He also reached out to the Utah Education Policy Center at the University of Utah, which translates research into educational practices. After more brainstorming, and without the money for a PR campaign like Washington’s, Ames and his team devised a project meant to reach parents in person. MILO & Friends — MILO stands for “math introduction and learning opportunities” — launched in September 2022.

Studies have shown that math-related board games offer an effective, easy way for parents to approach the subject with their kids. So finding a game that would be fun and easy for parents and their kids was an early focus for the initiative. The group eventually chose Happy Bunny after evaluating hundreds of games, because it calls for the right skills and is so straightforward that parents and kids can’t go wrong, Ames said.

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Back at Plymouth Elementary, the parents sat around tables playing the game with their children. It’s bunny versus farmer, and players roll a die with different colors on each face to move the bunny along a garden path with colored squares. Carrots are embedded in slots on the board, concealing that some have a bite out of them and others don’t. Players harvest the number of carrots listed on the colored square they land on, sorting bitten ones into the bunny’s pile and unbitten ones into the farmer’s pile. Once the bunny reaches the end of the path, players compare carrot piles to see whether the farmer or the bunny ended up with more. 

It seems simple, but there’s a lot of math going on, said Ames. Matching the color on the die to the color on the board is abstraction, a math skill. Understanding that you move to the next blue square and not just any blue square teaches sequencing. Learning that you pull the number of carrots shown on the square teaches symbolic number recognition. Counting the carrots teaches “cardinality” — the skill of connecting counting to the total number of objects in a set. And sorting carrots into two piles, bitten and unbitten, teaches set differentiation and categorization.

Katie Bearnson played with her sons Bentley, 5, and Bradley, 6. Bentley rolled the die. “I got orange!” he said. “So where’s the first orange?” Bearnson asked. He landed on a square with a four, and pulled four carrots. Two had a bite out of them and two didn’t. “So the bitten carrots are yummy for the bunny. The whole carrots belong to the farmer,” Bearnson explained.

At the end, Bentley and Bradley counted the piles and figured out that farmer and bunny tied at 20 carrots each.

“We’ve definitely leaned more toward reading than math because reading’s easy. You sit there and open a book and you can read to your kid,” said Bearnson afterward. “Math, you have to put a little bit of thought into it to ask questions.” After this event, she said, she planned to do more math-focused activities with Bentley before he starts kindergarten this year.

After a half hour or so, the families left, each taking with them a free copy of the game and laminated math conversation cards on a key ring that suggest simple ways to bring math talk to daily life: counting objects, naming shapes, using measurements like “long” and “wide” and more.

After the event, Emilia Perez talked about how one of these events affected her family. Now a family liaison with Plymouth Elementary’s family engagement program, Perez attended one of Ames’ sessions three years ago with her daughter Emily, then 2 years old.

Perez had encouraged Emily and two older siblings to practice counting before they entered kindergarten. But they skipped other math activities because Perez didn’t think of herself as a math person, she said.

After the session, she started playing Happy Bunny with Emily regularly and practicing arithmetic together as they’d walk down the street counting objects and signs. Emily is now in first grade and far ahead of the rest of her class, her mother said: She’s mastered multiplication and division, skills most kids don’t get until third grade.

“If I’d had this material for my older kids, just even known about it, it would have helped a lot,” she said.

Related: How to boost math skills in the early grades

Nationally, only a handful of projects exist to encourage parents to talk to their kids about early math. The largest might be California’s PBS SoCal Family Math initiative. Run by southern California’s public TV station, it offers family math workshops and events across the state and distributes materials to parents on talking to their young kids about math, among much else. The program has since been replicated in 12 states, said Rosemary Miller, the station’s senior director of early learning.

No research has been completed on the academic outcomes of these parent outreach efforts, but studies show they do make parents feel better about math: A 2025 evaluation of the PBS SoCal initiative concluded that parents participating in its workshops reported more confidence and positive feelings about math and more knowledge of foundational math skills than before the sessions.

MILO & Friends also changes parent attitudes. A study last year by the Utah Education Policy Center found that after attending the project’s events, parents reported feeling more confident about helping their young children with math. The effect was strongest among Spanish-speaking families and those with less education.

Starting next year, the Utah STEM Action Center team and policy center plan to collect kindergarten entry scores of children who’ve received MILO & Friends materials through a partnership with pediatricians.

For Madeleine Clark, coordinator of services for the family engagement program, the outreach is about even more than test scores. “If a child’s bored and they’re not getting that connection and that eye contact and that conversation from their parent, they usually melt down,” she said. What parents learn in the MILO sessions builds math skills, but it also builds connection, she said.

Ames, too, has a bigger aim. He cited research on the effects of early math on the development of reasoning ability and its importance to a healthy democracy of citizens who can think critically. “I care about living in a free society,” he said. “So selfishly I want everyone to have these skills.”

Contact editor Christina A. Samuels at 212-678-3635 or samuels@hechingereport.org.

This story about preschool math was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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