Sovay Thirteen.
Mum No, three.
Sovay Fourteen.
Parents do ask questions of a testing type as well as teachers. This nearly 3-year-old
did not give the adult the required response. If you study this closely you can see
that Sovay did indeed know that she was going to be three. The wrong answer to
Sovay appeared more stimulating than the right answer. She likes to play tricks. She
probably knew that I would find her answers funny as I caught on to her joke, but
at least at the beginning of the conversation I wanted to achieve my goal. I gave up
in the end and I played along with her joke. Dunn (1988) studied children’s humour
and found that 2-year-olds explore and exploit the possible distortions of what is
accepted in different ways with their siblings and their mothers. They are frequently
amused by the violation of rules.
Sovay gave me a richer indication of what she knew than if she had played along
with my expectations and given the standard answer of ‘three’. The evidence indi-
cates that Sovay was playing with numbers in a most sophisticated way.- She jumped around the number three, moving from two to four. This may have
indicated that she was aware of the numbers before and after three. - She used higher numbers, e.g. eighteen.
- She indicated an awareness of the relationship between three and thirteen. She
made out she had heard me say ‘thirteen’ instead of ‘three’ perhaps because it
sounds similar but she knows there is a difference. - Following thirteen she said ‘fourteen’. Again she may be indicating that she knows
the relationship between thirteen and fourteen as next to each other in the count-
ing sequence. - She used all these numbers with ease and confidence and was bold enough to use
them to tease an adult.
Sovay constructed her mathematical knowledge with her family. The influence of
her elder sister whom she loved to copy was valuable in aiding her growth. They
went about their childhood world comparing, examining and playing. A favourite
game was hide and seek and, even though Sovay could not count well enough in the
conventional manner to be a true ‘seeker’, she was permitted to do so by her sister
and her friends. The democratic atmosphere of the home allowed her to experiment
and become a mathematician.
Sovay also started to take an interest in writing down mathematics. I noted when she
was 3 years old that she wrote a dinner money envelope for her sister: she talked about
money and wrote her own symbols down (see p. 25). She also wrote her own symbols
at 4 years 3 months, explicitly naming numerals. However, these were the only inci-
dents in a two year span where I noted Sovay engaging with this kind of mathematical
mark-making. Her number talk and social interaction were much more dominant.
We believe that children are learning complex meanings and understandings of
their world at home and we argue throughout this book that they can construct their220 Children’s Mathematics8657part 2.qxd 04/07/2006 17:40 Page 220