Children\'s Mathematics

Sam Here’s some more money from the bank!

Sam gave me a handful of coins.

Carl This one’s £10.

I agreed to buy this cheaper car and counted out ten coins. Carl dipped his hands into a box

of toy cars and handed me a yellow bulldozer.

Teacher Oh dear! I can’t have this – it’s a bulldozer! I can’t take my children

to school in a bulldozer.

Cerrie-Ann Here’s one for £30. You can take your children to school in it and it’s

got petrol and it doesn’t need fixing – it’s G-reg.

Teacher That sounds good. But it needs a registration number plate!

Carl OK. 0665 G-reg.

Evaluation

Carl referred to his dad’s lorry several times and appeared to have a great deal of

knowledge about cars which he explored through talk and the marks he made.

Making paper and pens available widened the opportunities for him to include

mark-making if it arose within the context of his imaginary play.

Through closely observing Carl’s play it was clear that he had a well-developed

understanding of the use of numbers – for the price of a car, number plates and the

cost of parking tickets. For most of the parking tickets Carl used the first letter of his

name to stand for the number, but for ‘70p’ he wrote ‘17’ and wrote ‘8’ for ‘80p’. At

first when I explained that I thought £40 was too expensive for a car, he offered an

alternative but dearer one for £50: later he adjusted this and found one for £10.

Drawing on his knowledge of cars and lorries from his home experience, he was also

able to use a string of numbers for the car registration plate and knew the special

term used to describe the registration by a letter for the year it was first sold.

Additionally the observation illuminated other children’s understanding. Cerri-

Ann especially had listened to the features of cars that we discussed and integrated

them in her sales pitch for a car, offering one cheaper than Carl’s original offer and

incorporating several features I’d wanted. To make the deal attractive she confirmed

that it had a full tank of petrol and that it ‘doesn’t need fixing’ – a point Carl had

repeatedly made. Finally, she added Carl’s boast that her car too was a ‘G-reg’.

Children’s Centres:The Cambridge Learning Network

project

Focus:The Learning Environment

The Children’s Centres in England are based on the Every Child Matters agenda (DfES,

2004a), where the five outcomes of ‘Health, Safety, Enjoying and Achieving, Making

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