texts of mathematics and the variety of marks and written methods. The few com-
ments noted by parents during the seven days included:- studying the football league tables and cricket score cards
- converting rent paid per calendar month to a weekly amount and vice versa –
using a ready reckoner, calculator and mental arithmetic - Amy asked me what I was writing on my timesheet for work. I explained that I was
writing the number of hours I worked each day and that this would be used to cal-
culate how much money I earned.
Whilst some of their parents’ work may have seemed a little remote, other children
were regularly involved in what their parents did. Rose attended the After-School
Club that her mother ran. Her mother commented that ‘at home, Rose looked on as
I wrote out the bills for After-School Club.’
It is significant that no parents mentioned any marks their children made (print,
symbols, drawing, numbers) on paper. This suggests that it is likely that such chil-
dren’s behaviours were not seen as ‘mathematics’. In Sovay’s study it was found that
she did not use a prolific amount of mathematical representation: most of her rep-
resentations after the age of 4 years were connected with her current schema. As
Bottle has observed, ‘parents may not always be aware of, or be able to identify their
own contribution to the development of their child’ (Bottle, 1999, p. 56). Yet it is the
very fact that they have learnt mathematics at home in real contexts that provides
young children with the rich, informal knowledge that they bring to school.
When teachers and parents are able to share their knowledge, then parents’ aware-
ness of play and mark-making can increase – and so, of course, can teachers’. For
example, in a study of parents’ observations of their 7-year-olds’ mathematical
schemas, one of us had shared her knowledge of schemas with the parents. The
parents could then easily identify their children’s interests in this area when they
realised the possibilities.
The literacy events into which children are socialised also help them ‘to survive, to
consume, to act in the world’ (Barton, quoted in Barratt-Pugh and Rohl, 2000, p. 32).
Barton arranged family literacy events into categories. We have developed this theme
below for written mathematics based on responses from our questionnaires in this study.Mathematical literacy events within families
The comments below are taken directly from the parents’ questionnaires.
There were what Barton terms ‘private events’ which, in my study of ‘Mathemat-
ics at Home’, included comments such as ‘read a book about planets – counted and
compared sizes and distances’ and ‘learning the numbers on the new music organ.’
Other events involved instructions and consumable goods, for example ‘we meas-
ured washing powder (how many scoops?).’ Most parents recognised the mathe-
matics of television and videos and some helped their children understand when
they ‘talked about the way the hands go round the clock’ or ‘checked on Teletext.’
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