In the current issue of Children’s Advocate, writer Aimee Lewis-St Rain offers practical advice on creating natural opportunities for parents to cultivate a love of math and scientific discovery in their preschoolers. By encouraging your child to count everything imaginable, creating natural opportunities to explore and discover, and supporting your child’s natural impulse to play, you can boost your preschooler’s capacity for confidence and critical thinking.

For the purpose of this blog post, I was happy to discover her list of fun books for children that can help parents in this endeavor. I encourage you to check some of these out!

• “Red-eyed Tree Frog” by Joy Cowley is about a frog from the Central American rain forest searching for food and avoiding being eaten.
• “My Five Senses/Mis cinco sentidos” by Aliki presents the five senses and some ways we use them.
• “Bear in a Square/Oso en un cuadrado” by Stella Blackstone lets children find shapes hidden in illustrations.
• “I Get Wet” by Vicki Cobb makes science easy to understand.
• “1,2,3 Go!” by Huy Voun Lee introduces Chinese writing with simple words and the numbers one through ten.

~ Aaron Heffernan, MA, LCSW, Children’s Service Society of Wisconsin

Aaron is a child and family therapist at Children’s Service Society of Wisconsin specializing in trauma counseling. He has experience working with clients who are coping with depression, anxiety, divorce, and family and community violence. He is a certified practitioner of EMDR, and uses expressive modalities such as play therapy, bibliotherapy and music and art-based therapies with a wide range of clients.

Aaron is also a current partner with Project Ujima, a hospital-based program committed to helping families cope with community violence. He uses Hip Hop Music Therapy with many of his urban adolescent clients through their community outreach program.

Read more blog posts by Aaron Heffernan.