Children\'s Mathematics

history of his writing. But even these methods are not developed all at once: they

pass through a number of trials and inventions, constituting a series of stages with

which it is very useful for an educator working with children of school age children

and pre-school children to be acquainted. (Luria, 1983, p. 276)

As we shall show in Chapters 6 and 7, children’s ‘trials and inventions’ are at the

heart of their understanding of abstract symbolism in mathematics.

Marie Clay’s research in New Zealand highlighted the way in which new skills con-

tinually emerged during development. This definition led to the term ‘emergent

writing’ which has also sometimes been called ‘developmental’ or ‘process’ writing.

Since the publication of Clay’s study of young children’s writing in 1975, there has

been a considerable number of texts published on early or emergent writing; for

example, Cambourne, 1988, Hall, 1987, McNaughton, 1995.

Early writing and early mathematical marks

In my own research, in a study of my own child’s development of number,,I found

parallels with the way the child in the study developed number language and Clay’s

analysis of writing development (Carruthers, 1997a; 1997b; 1997c).

Early writing, early mathematics 63

Clay’s analysis of early writing

The sign concept– letters and their own

letter-like shapes represent a message

they can read

The message concept – you can write

down a message you want to convey

Recurring principle – where children use

any letters and words they know over

and over again

A generating principle – in which they

combine the letters they know in dif-

ferent ways to produce strings of print

A directional principle– children become

aware that writing is formed in hori-

zontal lines from left to right

Sovay’s acquisition of number

You can talk number words for count-

ing in different ways and you need

numbers in different situations

Numbers can be written down for pur-

poses, e.g. Sovay wrote marks on her

sister’s dinner money envelope to

convey how much money was there

Sovay – 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2; counting

pebbles. ‘6’ became all numbers

Playing with her sister using pencil and

paper saying ‘26, 29, 24, 3, 6, 9, 17, 16,

2, 3, 1, 7’. Making her own symbols on

the paper

Sovay’s data from this period (before she

was 44 months of age), came from her

talk. In 90 per cent of her recorded

talking and counting numbers she began

with the lowest numbers and graduated

to the highest e.g. ‘1, 59, 51, 52, 53’

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