It's OK to make mistakes!

My daughter has been getting her 9s and 6s mixed up.  She gets them right about half the time.  The great thing about the Peaceful Preschool numeral cards is that she can self-correct by counting the dots.

For a quick math lesson, I gave her three cards and instructed her to order them a certain way (first three digits of my phone number).  She mixed up the 6 and the 9 but I didn't stop her and most importantly I did NOT tell her she was WRONG!  I let her finish her thought process and then asked her a series of questions that led her to finding and correcting her own mistake.

Why is this important?  Because as children grow, they become more afraid of messing up.  They don't want to take chances or even TRY for fear of getting it wrong.  Take every opportunity to build your child's confidence.  

Confidence is one of the 6 Cs that help your child become "well-adjusted critical thinkers," (Becoming Brilliant, What Science Tells Us About Raising Successful Children).  As a public school teacher, I've met so many children who refuse to try as a defense mechanism.  They lack the confidence to get the wrong answer because either they've been criticized or over-corrected in the past.

School teachers and parents should be facilitators for young children.  Let your child take ownership of their learning.  In this short activity of auditory numeral sequencing, my daughter made a mistake, found the mistake, and fixed it through my purposeful questioning and facilitation.

It takes discipline for a parent to step back and let your child make a mistake without fixing it for them.  Lead them through questions and guidance to the correct outcome.

I decided to show the whole interaction as opposed to the edited version from Instagram because it shows what it's really like to work with a 3 year old.  Don't feel the need to force a lesson or continue because you didn't get the outcome you wanted.  Next time your child won't want to sit down with you to work because they remember how frustrating it was the previous time.  It may seem like this lesson was a failure, but connections were made.  This is progress.