Children\'s Mathematics

How curious it must seem to a child beginning school, if so many of her early experi-

ments with print are not recognised and understood by the adults in the class. Confu-

sion must surely occur if what was accepted as writing at home is not considered

writing at school. (National Writing Project, 1989, p. 18)

The evolution of children’s early marks

Introduction

In Chapter 5 we highlighted the difficulties young children experience when they

move from home to the increasingly abstract symbolism of school mathematics.

Aubrey comments about children’s early experiences of education when teachers

seem unaware of the ‘rich, informal knowledge brought into school’ (Aubrey, 1997b,

p. 138). Our evidence is that Early Years teachers often also fail to recognise the value

of children’s early informal marks, including those that may be mathematical. This

difficulty, highlighted in the responses from many teachers in our questionnaire,

indicates something of the extent of the problem (see Chapters 1 and 5). In this

chapter we focus on the development of children’s early mathematical marks.

Whilst early marks may sometimes be valued as the beginning of drawing and

writing, early mathematical graphics are rarely acknowledged (Matthews, 1999, p.

85). For teachers and educators this may be in part due to the fact that so little has

been researched or written about children’s early mathematical graphics. It is almost

as though young children never make mathematical marks: yet our evidence,

exemplified through the many examples of children’s marks in this book clearly

contradicts this.

Most studies have so far concentrated on the analysis of children’s number repre-

sentations in clinically set-up tasks (Hughes, 1986; Munn, 1994; Sinclair, 1988). Both

Gifford and Pengelly, in two separate investigations, set up single class studies. In

doing so they identified the richness of children’s own methods in real teaching

situations. However, both of these studies were of one task, in one class and, because

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Making Sense of

Children’s

(^6) Mathematical Graphics
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