The home provides a real and purposeful learning situation with an immense
range of events that occur as a result of everyday living. The situations that children
are exposed to are with people who know them, who share their backgrounds and
common experiences. This is important when the adults in the home are interacting
with the children since it is easier to understand what the children are saying and to
help them in their learning.
Nurseries and school settings cannot match the home as a learning environment.
The Tizard and Hughes study in England also highlighted the differences between
nursery settings and home and found that the latter, in many ways, provided a more
enabling learning environment.
Since the home is such a strong learning environment then Early Years settings
need to continue to make connections with families to support and understand the
child’s home experience: in this way they will help children make the connections
necessary to understand their school mathematics. Through two case studies, one of
a child at home (Carruthers, 1997c) and the other of a group of parents of a 4–6-year-
old class, we are going to analyse the following questions.- What mathematics do young children do at home?
- What is their knowledge of mathematics?
- What is the role of parents in their children’s mathematics?
- How do we work together with parents to support children’s mathematics?
- Does the home continue to be supportive of children’s mathematics?
- What mathematics do parents notice at home?
- What mathematical writing do young children see their parents and older siblings
engaged in? - What mathematical writing (marks) do parents observe their young children do?
What mathematics do young children do at home?
In a study of my own child I followed her own self-initiated, numeracy-related actions
in the world from when she was 22 months until she was 42 months old (Carruthers,
1997c). Most of my findings on her development came from her number language.
From this I observed that she developed an understanding of numbers and how they
worked in a variety of meaningful, mathematical contexts. Before Sovay entered
nursery school at 3 years 6 months she had, through her own chosen actions in the
world, used mathematics in nearly every area of the subject. She had also tuned in to
mathematics and had, in similar terms to Holdaway’s literacy set, a mathematical set:
the ability to tune in with appropriate action (Holdaway, 1979). Children who have
developed a mathematical set (Carruthers, 1996) have the following abilities: they- are aware that numbers have meaning in all mathematical areas and engage with
numbers in a meaningful way - use numbers to talk in the context of their own lives
- know that numbers can be written down and in some cases use their own written
symbols
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