- Marina and Rachel chose ten scallop shells and into each they put two wooden
beads (see Figure 9.10). By choosing their own ways of representing the problem
and selecting their resources and their method, they explored repeated addition
(early multiplication). The children connected their first-hand experience of the
rail journey and simplified the question by reducing the number in each carriage.
In this way the question was essentially the same (multiplication), but was
matched to a level appropriate to them. They were then able to work out an
answer for ‘two people in each carriage and ten carriages’ in a way that made real
sense to them.
Figure 9.10 Marina and Rachel’s scallop-shell train- Frances used a range of responses and was the only child to use standard (sym-
bolic) number symbols as a part of her working out. She began with a drawing of
a carriage with seats. At the top she wrote ‘75 seats’ although she only had room
to draw seven seats in her carriage.
Next Frances wrote ‘75’, seven times (Figure 9.11a). In the lower half of the page
she wrote ‘There’s five in the carriage. There’s seven carriages’. Frances then col-
lected a tray of plastic bricks and put five in each of seven trays and counted them.
Returning to her paper she drew five people and wrote ‘35’ beneath them: Frances
had calculated ‘seven lots of five’. By doing this she appeared to have been calcu-
lating (by repeated addition) with the ‘7’ and the ‘5’ of ‘75’. She may also have
worked with the smaller numbers to help her understand how to then work on
the problem using the larger numbers.
Next Frances drew squares to represent the seats within the carriage (see Figure
9.11b). On re-counting she found that she had drawn 76 rather than 75 and
crossed one out.
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