One way I helped introduce simple math to my now four year old son, when he was your son's age, was in the context of simple games. So if we would play, for instance, our super version of "Punch Buggy", we would get points as follows (it was actually his idea to do this):
1 point for new-model punch buggies (Volkswagen Beetles), Mini Coopers, smart cars, and ridden motorcycles
2 points for old-model punch buggies, planes, and helicopters
He was very early on good at keeping track of everyone's different scores. Then I would increase his number awareness and recall (which was already pretty good) with a recap: "So I've seen 2 punch buggies and 1 plane, which gives 2 points for punch buggies and 2 points for the one plane, totaling 4, right? And you've got..." He quickly picked that up to the point of memorizing categories of what every person had seen, then we were on to the next thing. (Honestly, I think he had developed pretty good number sense even before this, so it was mostly a memory exercise at that stage.)
In my case I really didn't try to develop his math talent much at all, just generally keep him thinking about numbers at odd times and in little ways, but he naturally became more interested in it. What I did do was give him lots of interesting things to play with, so he'd learn how things fit together.
I think that if your son shows math talent, letting him play with some manipulatives would let him develop his own number sense, along with some other foundational skills for math. You might also check out the math websites. My son is currently having a lot of fun picking and choosing things on the ixl.com website (loves the patterns, etc. but predictably not the boring drills).
Last edited by Iucounu; 06/23/10 02:39 PM.
