Ep #94: Overcoming Math Anxiety with Dr. Sara Delano Moore

What is math anxiety? Does your kid have it? And if so, what do you do about that? Just had the most amazing conversation with Dr. Sara Delano Moore. She is the vice president of research and content at ORIGO education and a chair of their mathematics advisory board.

She’s a fourth generation educator, and you should see her resume. It is crazy impressive, including studying at Oxford, PhD, all the things. But what was so fun about talking with Sara, she is so down to earth and genuine, she’s funny. But what we talked about was how kids’ image or thoughts around math are so impacted by the adults in their life, which is kind of hard to hear sometimes if you’re the adult, but also very empowering because there’s something that we can do, which is so good because if it’s just a gene, right? If math was just a gene, then there’s not really much we can do about it, but math is not a gene. So there is something we can do about it.

And she’s gonna tell you what that is. This conversation was so helpful and encouraging and kind of fun. So I hope you’ll enjoy it. It’s coming up right after this.

Welcome to the Raising Healthy Kid Brains podcast, where moms and teachers come to learn all about kids’ brains, how they work, how they learn, how they grow, and simple tips and tricks for raising the most resilient, kind, smart, compassionate kids we can. All while having lots of grace and compassion for ourselves, because, you know what? We all really need and deserve that, too. I am your host, Amy Nielson, let’s get ready to start the show.

Amy: Sara, I’m so happy to have you on the show today. Welcome.

Sara: Well, thank you. It’s nice to be here.

Amy: So I cannot wait to talk about what we’re talking about today because we’re talking about math and kids with math and all kinds of math things and how to help kids that don’t love math. And so I’m very excited. I’ve seen the questions we’re talking about. Before we get to all of that, can you just give us like a little bit of background about you and how you got to this place and why you have all this information for us that’s gonna like be really helpful?

Sara: So I’m a fourth generation teacher. Wow. The generations ahead of me taught English and Latin, so where I got the math thing from, nobody’s quite sure, but I have some credibility of history. I started as a teacher teaching middle school math and science, loved it. I’m a person who as a child was sent to the principal’s office for asking why too many times.

Amy: Oh, okay. I love it.

Amy: And so I wanted to really figure out how do you teach and make questions like why okay? And so my career took me on a journey from the classroom to higher ed where I was a university teacher educator for a while and I’ve been in educational publishing for the last about 20 years. Today, I serve as vice president for content and research at ORIGO Education. So it’s been a journey and a lot of fun.

Sara: I love it so much. Oh, this is so good. And I think so many things you bring up. Okay, so I have eight children, right? Which is a lot, but it’s so much fun. I love it. So five of them are ones that I gave birth to, and then I got three bonus kids. They have different perspectives on math, right? So I have a 10-year-old who if you ask her what her favorite subject is in school, right? I used to say PE or something, right? Or lunch. So you ask her what her favorite subject is and she’s like, it’s math. I love math. Math’s amazing, right? And then I have kids that you ask them about math and they kind of hate it.

So I’m very curious to like get to chat about this because I’m sure I’m not the only one that has kids that don’t quite love math. So one of the things we had here to talk about is math anxiety. Can you talk to me about like, what is that? And yeah, let’s start there.

Amy: It’s a great place to begin. And yes, I have a second grader granddaughter who will tell you, I don’t like math. My favorite subject is recess. And then we’re getting ready for bed. And she says, can I do some math problems first?

Sara: So I love it.

Amy: I understand. Math anxiety is this idea of anxiety moving towards a psychological, formal idea of anxiety that it makes my heart race, it makes me scared, it makes it hard for me to do what I need to do when I’m asked to do math. And what we find generally is that kids aren’t born with math anxiety. There’s not a math gene. Some of us aren’t born as good at math or not good at math.

But what happens in school seems to contribute to math anxiety, particularly when we get to the point in second, third grade, maybe, where speed comes into play. If you think about the school definition of being good at math, it’s finding one right answer really fast. And, you know, for me, I could do that because I could play school, but I wanted to know why. And that got me in trouble.

For other students who may not work at that speed and be comfortable with that race competitive mode, they’re thinking, I don’t want to do this. I’m scared of this.

Sara: And it’s like a spiral. Is there like shame in it? Like if you’re not fast enough, or is it just like the pressure to perform well, and it’s like, oh, if I don’t, if I’m not fast enough, I don’t know, like, what is it?

Amy: I think it’s some of both. I think it’s pressure to perform. And in some cases, depending on how the grownups handle the concern, I think there can be a sense of shame. You know, we find with… And now I’m just talking about kids, not math in particular.

They don’t make a big deal out of things that the grown-ups around them don’t make a big deal out of. And so if, as a teacher, my stance is, I want you to be fast enough, but this is not a race, it’s more likely to be smooth than if the teacher says, oh my goodness, you only got 20 out of 50 problems in that two minutes. We gotta do better than that. Now I’m ashamed.

Amy: Parents and teachers are maybe feeling pressured, right, because teachers are being graded on the scores and progress their children are making. So there’s pressure on teachers, right? And parents, I think, are feeling pressure because we’re getting report cards or things about your kid’s falling behind in math. No one wants to go to that parent-teacher conference, right?

I guess the idea that’s popping to my brain maybe of the way we word this with our kids, because we’re wanting to encourage them to make progress, but maybe not put all the pressure on performance, performance pressure, right?

Is there wording you would suggest? I’m kind of thinking like maybe we could say, hey, look how many you got the last time. That was so great. I wonder if we could get one or two more this time, right, on those time tests where you’re trying to get all the multiplication things done in a minute or whatever, right? Is that something that’s giving gentle encouragement to keep going, but isn’t that performance pressure?

Sara: You’re very much on the right track. That idea of, let’s look for growth. Last time I got this many, this time I got this many. Isn’t it great? If teachers want the time data, there are two ways to think about that. One is to make sure we’re giving kids a reasonable amount of time. 50 problems in a minute, you know, the old-fashioned mad minutes from school, is way too fast. Fast enough on a practical scale is three to five seconds per fact. And so I might do 12 or 15 problems in a minute.

And in that case, one of the questions is 7 plus 1. I know that. I can write it down instantly. Another problem might be 9 plus 6. And I’ve got to stop and think, wait a minute, all right, 9 and 6. Well, one more would be 10. And then what have I got left? I’ve got five left. Oh, it’s 15. That was a five or six second thinking.

And so when you give kids that sort of range, they’re fast enough. That’s a speed at which their computation is not going to interfere with their ability to get through the day. And it gives them time to use their strategies to really think about what they know instead of feeling like it’s a race.

One of the things we think about is how much time are we giving students? If you’ve got littles, so a first grader who’s still learning to write, you probably need to double that time if you’re asking them to write their answers down instead of measuring orally. Because I need three or four seconds to figure out what the answer is, and then I might need another three or four seconds to think, okay, I’m writing 15. Now, wait a minute, that’s a 1, and then what does a 5 look like? And that’s a teacher’s developmental gauge. Or it’s the first time I’ve ever taken a test like this on the computer. How do I type it in? Those things also come into play. The best strategy for timing I see teachers use is actually to have kids change pen colors or pencil colors.

So I want everybody to start with their regular pencil, and when I give you the signal, you’re gonna put that down and pick up the pencil that’s your favorite color, or the other color. You know, in some classrooms, I would say, choose your own other color, and other classrooms, we’re not going down that road. We’re all using blue or green or whatever. And the teacher then says, change at a minute, minute and a half, and you have all the time you want to finish.

Amy: Right. I love that.

Sara: Yeah. And that way I can see what you can get done in a minute, minute and a half. We might even start to graph our progress on the ones done in the first color. But I’m not telling you to race to finish everything in that time.

Amy: Right. Oh, I love that. Oh, it’s so good because it takes away, I think, the pressure allows them to just solve and then, but you can track progress still. So you get all the pieces. Oh, genius.

Sara: Exactly. Yes. Yeah. And I can’t tell you who the first teacher was I saw do that. I can only say I only get credit for sharing the idea I didn’t invent it.

Amy: That’s how so many good ideas happen though.

Sara: We just share it. That’s so good.

Amy: Okay, so why do we have some kids that are experiencing more of this anxiety than others. So for example, I have a kid headed to university today to take her first university math exam and she is nervous. She’s like really scared.

She’s so good at math, but she’s like feeling all the nerves and whatever, right? So like, why do some feel more nervous? And then, you know, I have my son who’s just like, he could care less. Like he doesn’t love math, but he’s really good at it and he just does it. And then he moves on to this life and he wants to go do Pokemon or something, you know?

Sara: Yeah, some of it is just, we have different ways of being nervous and sort of degrees of, I’ll call it personal anxiety. What is normal, what is typical is within a range. And there’s a level of go with the flow, which is problematic in different ways. And we’ll leave that there. And there’s a level of anxiety that’s problematic.

So when I hear about your child taking a university math exam today, that might be, this is my first college math test. They’ve raised the bar. And so I am a little nervous. I’ve always said, initially as a classroom teacher, when I was in the classroom full-time, and now even when I go in like to teach a demonstration lesson or those kinds of things, the day I’m not a little bit nervous about that is the day I need to think about stopping. I need to give it enough seriousness.

I’m not nervous about whether I know the stuff anymore. I’m nervous about, is this going to work for the people around me or the teacher whose classroom I’m coming into, for these children that I’m trying to help develop and with their school develop a new approach. I ought to be a little bit nervous because that’s taking it seriously. If I’m panicked to the point of I can’t sleep, that’s a problem. And so I think we’ve got to look at that to some extent when we think about questions like that.

The other part of it is that anxiety can be contextual. Tests scare me, but doing my homework doesn’t. Or I’m really confident on my own, but you put me on a group project and I’m not sure I want to talk about and speak up for my ideas. And so I think there’s that broad notion of how do we help kids see math as interesting, useful, worthwhile, not scary. And that’s really what we’re going for.

Some level of anxiety is also just who are we as people and what context is there.

Amy: Yeah, and I love that, like you’re kind of normalizing to some extent, a little bit of discomfort, right? And we’re allowed to feel a little discomfort and sometimes a little bit of discomfort is helpful because that’s what you feel when you’re growing, right? And so a little bit of that is healthy as long as it’s not overtaking everything, right?

Okay, so I love kind of this where we’re headed with this, which is this idea of helping children maybe care more about math or be more invested in it because it’s something that matters to them. Because you know, you hear the things where it’s like, I’m never going to use this, right?

I don’t know why I’m doing this. This doesn’t apply to anything, right? It’s just this kind of abstract whatever thing. So how do we, yeah, how do we kind of help kids get buy-in on math and care about it and feel like it’s relevant to them?

Sara: One of the ways we do that is for all of their grownups, family, siblings, whoever that might be, to acknowledge where math is helpful to them, to recognize that if we have to leave for school at 8:15 and it takes us 20 minutes to eat breakfast and 10 minutes to get dressed and, and, and, and. That’s a math problem. I don’t write it down and talk about it like a textbook math problem, but to acknowledge, hey, we’re using math today. We’re planning the family holiday dinner and we’re going to have 15 extra people. And how big a turkey do we need to buy?

Or whatever that might be to help kids see math in their everyday life. When it’s, they’re getting an allowance based on a chore chart. I want this toy that’s going to cost $17. How much money do you have? Okay.

You have $13. How many more do you need? Let them do some of that work in age-appropriate ways. And then, all right, if you need four more dollars, what chores can you do to earn four more dollars? Back on you.

It’s not a formal math lesson, but it’s showing them that the math that they’re learning, K2, it’s largely addition and subtraction, can be helpful. Older kids, put them in charge of the grocery budget or that kind of thing.

Amy: Right. So interesting. Okay. So I love several pieces about that. It’s normalizing it. Right. And, and then we’re not going into the whole, like, I don’t know why they make us do this. I haven’t used this since high school or whatever.

Sara: Right.

Amy: I think like, I’m hearing you say, don’t use those phrases with our children.

Sara: Yes, and I’ll say it explicitly. If you’re nervous about math, it’s okay to say, I have to think about this and I can do it. It’s not okay to say, I wasn’t good at math and I’m doing all right. So it’s okay if you’re not good at math. And very few people would say exactly those words, but you’re right.

We’ve got to be careful as adults about our messaging to students.

Amy: Right. And are we, are we giving them the modeling, the math is boring and you’re never gonna use it anyway, but you just have to do it to get through school or whatever, or are we saying, oh my goodness, you just used some math, how cool is that, right? Kind of.

Sara:. Yeah. Exactly. Or here’s how I’m using math.

Amy: So when we’re talking about this, one of the things I’ve heard, right, is like this idea of math brain, right? And that you’re like kind of strengthening maybe and speeding up some of those pathways in your brain if you’re doing it often and you can kind of get out of practice if you’re not doing it as often. Would you agree with that or no?

Sara: I might reframe it a little bit.

Amy: Okay, I’d love to hear, what do you think?

Sara: The first thing I think about is there’s no math gene, there’s no math, I’m a math person, I’m not. So the brain we’ve got is the brain we’ve got and it does all kinds of stuff. And that’s cool. And we know that the skills and information we use regularly stays in our heads more.

Amy: Right.

Sara: You studied language, whatever, in high school and high school was not last year. Ask me to go speak that language. Probably not. But if I decided six weeks ahead of a trip to France, I’m going to pull up Duolingo and play around a little bit or that kind of tool, it might come back a bit faster because I had it in my head from way back when. So with math, it is a question of we need to use it.

And what we’re really developing is not so much math pathways as thinking pathways, logic pathways. So if I learn about making 10 as a strategy to add, my nine plus six example from before. That’s the strategy I was thinking out loud. I can not only use that for my basic addition facts, but I could say, wait a minute, 197 add 12. Well, three more will take me to 200, and then there are nine more, so 209.

I could say seven-eighths add three-eighths, well, one more eighth will take me to a whole. In other words, while it starts as make 10, because that’s the universe we live in in grades one and two, it becomes take this other number, break it apart and make something friendly so that you can do it in your head. Because what’s really fun if you’ve got kids who are good at the strategies is to play race the calculator. There are a lot of problems where, like my 197 add 12 or something, you can do it faster in your head than you can to whip out your phone and open the calculator and type it all in. I see teachers do that in say fourth and fifth grade and parents certainly could too.

It’s a great way to encourage kids. Again, you’re thinking about, are you fast enough? You’re encouraging a little bit of speed. That’s in and of itself not a bad thing, but you’re doing it in a more gamified way of we all think calculators are the be all end all.

Amy: Right. Yes.

Sara: But you know, if I actually know what I’m doing, I can be faster than the calculator.

Amy: Yeah, it’s kind of like a gamification, but also empowering a little bit. Like, yeah, if you can be faster than the calculator, I love it, it’s fantastic. And just showing how cool your brain is and the things it can do, which is so fun. Yeah.

Sara: I mean, when I was in school, we had to learn long division because my teacher was telling the truth when she said, you won’t always have a calculator. If a teacher says that today, they’re lying.

Most of us have one in our pocket and on our wrist at all times. So why do we need to know about the division algorithm? I wouldn’t mind if they took it out of the standards, but nobody’s asked me that.

But the way we ought to learn it is to understand what’s happening in division and what’s happening with the numbers, because then we get to dividing fractions and we’re not completely freaked out when one divided by one eighth is eight. And I always thought division makes things small.

Amy: Right. Yeah. It makes you understand what you’re doing. Yeah.

Sara: You can go somewhere.

Amy: So how do we do that with our kids? Because I feel like one of the most powerful things I can do as a parent, you know, if for our teachers listening, right, they can apply some of these things in the classroom, but for parents at home, when we have a lot of parents listening, how do we do this?

I love to do stuff like this in the car or just kind of throughout life and whatever we’re doing, but what could that look like? What’s some language around that or an example of what that could look like?

Sara: So as families, we want to think about that in terms of first noticing where math is in our own lives. So starting to recognize, say, from some of the examples we’ve talked about today, if you’re planning a trip, whether a summer drive to the beach for a weekend or extended complicated vacation or going to grandma’s for Thanksgiving. There’s a lot of math there and a lot of opportunity to show students for a lot of that, probably middle school kids and up. That’s not where I’m going to start with a kindergartner.

But there’s a lot of opportunity there to call out some math, to get them involved in doing math that they might care about because they want to go to Grandma’s the Beach, wherever it is we’re headed. For younger ones, it’s going to be more in, can you help me set the table? How many plates do you need to take out of the cupboard? Or here are three plates that are clean in the dishwasher. How many more do you need to get to have one for everybody? That kind of partial.

Amy: And you’re just using the language. I love the way you’re using it because if we’re not saying we’re going to do some addition now, right? Everyone gets out your paper. It’s just using it in the logic and the reasoning and all of that while they’re already doing things.

I love doing this. I have a couple of examples of my favorite ones to use. My kids like to cook with me or bake with me. And so if we’re doubling a recipe or having a recipe or whatever, right, or they have the measuring cups and spoons and they’re, I love this one and they’re having, they want to, like they’re asking me to bake. So I love that one.

And then another one that I have found to be so helpful is games. Kids love to play games. And I find sometimes when you’re playing like Sorry, and you’re kind of over it as a parent, and you want to just count for them because you know exactly how many spaces there are or Monopoly or whatever, right? You know exactly how many spaces there are. It’s just taking them a while to count the money or to count every single space.

You’re like, dude, you could just sit here. But letting kids do the math, they’re playing a game. Like they’re playing with you. They’re having the best time. This is what they wanted to do. And yet they’re practicing their math skills.

Sara: Yes, yes. My granddaughter was playing something on grandpa’s phone last night, and she was making a cheerleader and she knew she needed 100 points to get the pom-poms she wanted and be able to buy them from the store. And so she sat there for 15 minutes while I’m sort of annoyed by the screen time, but listening to her, as you say, “Oh, now I’ve got 80, I only need 20 more points. Now I’ve got 85” and she’s doing math and she’s having a good time. And I’ll put up with a certain amount of screen time or making an extra batch of cookies or whatever it might be because we’re doing the math.

That’s it. Exactly.

Amy: Is there value to bringing that up? Because I feel like kids start to identify as things and then it kind of feels like our brain like engages to protect whatever identity we’ve assigned ourselves. And so when a child is saying like, I hate math, I’m so bad at math or whatever, is there value in, when they’re sitting there on their screen and saying, oh, I just only need 20 more points, so I’m five points away, whatever. Is there a value in saying, well, look at you, just being quite the mathematician or something like that to help them start to recognize the math they’re already doing and identify as someone who can do math?

Sara: In general, yes. There’s always a footnote of know your kids. There are some kids who don’t want attention called to anything. And if you’ve got one of those, you might need to be a little more subtle. But I often will pepper a conversation with, I love how you use math there. And just keep talking. So tell me about why you’re so proud that I just told you you did math.

Amy: So just tagging it, just a little tag. It’s like, oh math, okay. So I wanted to bring something up. We’re getting close to out of time, but there was something I thought was so good in here, in this way of kind of doing literacy and math together and the value in that. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Sara: Sure. Kids love stories. Children’s view of the world is through storytelling. You ask them what happened at school today, and you’re going to get a story. You’re not going to get a list.

And so when we use literature to teach anything, we’re keying into that idea of kids as storytellers and telling, addressing the math as a story. It often is more connected to the real world or it creates some humor. There’s a book that’s called How Big is a Foot that’s been around for a long, long time. And the king wants to give his wife, the queen, the gift of a new bed. And so he measures how long the bed needs to be in his feet, not our standard unit of measure, but just the king’s feet.

And then the instructions get handed down through eight layers of apprentices to this apprentice, who’s much smaller than the king, who builds a bed that is eight of his feet tall or long, and it doesn’t fit the queen. In that case, it’s about the importance of standardizing units of measure, but the humor in it, because it’s a good story. So they make this bed and it’s this little tiny bed and it doesn’t fit the queen, especially when she wears her crown, which she does all the time, even when she sleeps. You know, there are these sort of refrains of just give it humor.

Amy: Right.

Sara: Other times, you know, there’s a book I love for high schoolers called The Man Who Made Time Travel. It’s about a British clockmaker who solved the problem of longitude. He figured out how to measure longitude so that sailors could know where they were east to west out on these sailing ships by building a clock. And it’s just a cool story. It’s riddled with the math of time zones and angles and all this kind of thing.

It’s also just a really cool story of a guy who wasn’t supposed to win this big prize that the fancy Brits had decided one of their own would win, but he won it. And we’re dependent on that. For littles, there are all kinds of books and stories that talk about math and give it that context.

You might have a child who sees themselves more as a reader than a mathematician. Okay, let’s read about math. Or they’re into math and we need to get them reading a little more. Let’s read about math. You can just build that connection and network.

Amy: I love that. Oh, they’re so mutually supportive. I wanna go get this book now. So that needs to happen. I’m thinking this could be really fun.

And I’m a little bit of a book hoarder. My husband has started to not take me to the thrift store anymore because I go straight to the book section and it’s getting a little overwhelming.

Sara: My husband is a reading educator who has made a career out of using picture books to teach content. We won’t even talk about the book collection in my basement.

Amy: I think we could be friends. We could be friends, for sure.

Sara: For sure.

Amy: I love it so much. That’s amazing. This has been so good. We are out of time, but I just want to ask you if there’s anything else, like a final word you would want to say to our listeners around their children and math and something that I feel like is such a struggle for so many people to have the anxiety around math or not feeling like we’re good enough at math or all those things. Like what would you say to a parent who has a kid who’s in that space?

Sara: I think two things are important. One is notice where they’re doing math well and pat them on the shoulder for it in whatever way makes sense for that child. And the second is to look at ourselves reflectively, both in terms of noticing where there’s math, so we can call it out a little more or see it in our child in a way, and then not communicating our own anxiety, whatever that might be.

And it’s fair to say I’ve often felt I wasn’t good enough at math, but now I realize I use algebra every time I make a spreadsheet at work. But instead of X, it’s C4. It’s still a variable. And I realize that I see that we look at all this math we’re using when we plan our vacation and communicate that a little bit of anxiety is okay and we get better and more confident by working on it.

Amy: So good. I love it so much. We model, I think, so much of the attitude that our kids are going to have around it. And I think we do the same for reading, right? And all these things, right?

And so if we have excitement or interest in it, even really, not even like, we don’t have to be like, yeah, right. But if we show some interest in it, right? Like you said, pointing out where we’re using it in our lives. Oh, that’s cool. I just did math to like figure this out or whatever, right?

And I kind of had a project for a while for my children of having them plan trips and I’ll tell them, you know, maybe if you plan this trip, then we can go on it. And so I love that you brought that up. I have a son who wants to go to Petra and he came home from school. And he really wants to go to Petra. I’m like, okay, plan the trip. And so he has to do all the research and build this whole plan and where we’re going to stay and all the things and some other things to do near there. And he’s like, mom, there is nothing else to do in Jordan. And I said, oh, that’s true.

I bet there is anyway. But yeah, and they get to do the math around it. And I don’t say, hey, you have to go do some math, right? But you’ve got to, you know, what’s the budget going to be? Where are we going to stay?

How much, where’s the food? You know, all those things. And they make up this whole plan and they do this presentation, right? And next week I get to take one of my kids to Japan on a trip that they planned. So it’s kind of, it’s kind of cool, right?

When they get to kind of do some of that and that can look like you said, like, is this a trip to the grocery store? What a fun game to say, hey, $10 budget for dinner. You get to plan it. What are we having? And they get to come up with all the pieces. Or I will do our gingerbread houses at Christmas time, few months away, but they get a $5 budget to go to this bulk food store that’s like the coolest, right? Because it has all the different things and they get to have their $5 budget and pick out it. And they have to weigh because it’s just by the ounce, right? So they have to do all the math.

And I don’t say, you know, like, I don’t make it a big math thing, but they have to calculate the price per ounce and how many dollars they’re all doing all the calculations to figure out what candies they can do to design these gingerbread houses and whatever. So I love just how do we let them do that in a way that’s fun and interesting to them.

Sara: Yeah, we’re buying party favors for your birthday party. We’ve got $20 to spend. Let’s go to the party store and look at what you want.

Amy: So good, so good. I love this. This has been so helpful. Where can we send people to find more about what you do and to find you online?

Sara: You’ve got some links for finding me online in terms of the writing I’ve done and those pieces. ORIGO has a great blog where we post ideas for families, ideas for teachers, this notion of how do you think about strategies? How do you bring math into the summer, into everyday life? There are lots of resources there. And for the teachers who are listening, obviously you can find out about our more school-focused resources as well.

Amy: Absolutely. Amazing. Okay, and we’ll put all those links in the show notes for our listeners.

Sara: Awesome.

Amy: It’ll be so good.

Thank you so much for coming and talking to me today. This has been a lovely conversation and I think it’s gonna help our kids feel a little more empowered in math.

Sara: I hope so. Thanks for having me. Enjoy Japan.

Amy: Thank you.

Sara: All right.

Don’t you just love all the fun things we’re learning on this show together? Well, we wanted to give you a chance to practice a little bit of it at home. And so we made you a special freebie just for being a listener here. You can grab it at PlanningPlaytime.com/special-freebie.

So what this freebie is, I’ll tell you, is an amazing alphabet activity that you can start using with your kiddos. And it is based in play and is so fun. You can use dot markers with it.

You can use Q-tip painting. You could use circled cereal.There’s all kinds of options. You can print it out today and get started. Just head over to PlanningPlaytime.com/special-freebie, and we’ll send that to you right away.

Thank you for hanging out with me today for this fun chat on Raising Healthy Kid Brains. If you want to see more of what we’re doing to support kiddos and their amazing brains, come visit us on our website PlanningPlaytime.com. See you next week.