BUFFALO — Many 4-year-olds cannot count up to their own age when they arrive at preschool, and those at the Stanley M. Makowski Early Childhood Center are hardly prodigies. Most live in this city’s poorer districts and begin their academic life well behind the curve.
Students at the Stanley M. Makowski Early Childhood Center get an early introduction to math concepts.
Brain Power
Wired for MathFor all that scientists have studied it, the brain remains the most complex and mysterious human organ.
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Melissa Hitzges, a teacher at the Stanley M. Makowski Early Childhood Center, working with her students to help them recognize patterns.
But there they were on a recent Wednesday morning, three months into the school year, counting up to seven and higher, even doing some elementary addition and subtraction. At recess, one boy, Joshua, used a pointer to illustrate a math concept known as cardinality, by completing place settings on a whiteboard.
“You just put one plate there, and one there, and one here,” he explained, stepping aside as two other students ambled by, one wearing a pair of clown pants as a headscarf. “That’s it. See?”
