Helping Children Make Sense of Numbers
Young children continuously demonstrate a sense of wonder and enchantment about their world. They show a natural curiosity that drives and motivates them to learn about things and people in their environments. Children will continuously seek to interact with the environment in an effort to make sense of their world from which to construct new understanding and knowledge. Similarly, the early years math environment should advocate a very natural, spontaneous and active approach where children can be directly involved in learning and making sense of numbers.
An important consideration for effective learning of numbers is that the processes of learning must be enjoyable and meaningful to the children. Many literature studies have shown that in order for children to make sense of numbers, it is best that such learning be meaningfully integrated in the context of children's everyday experiences. Effectively, opportunities for a variety of authentic and concrete work and interactions will allow and encourage children to explore numbers in the real world, from which to develop a more enhanced understanding of the functionality of numbers, and how numbers apply to their daily lives and context of their environment. For example, a child who has learned the numeral symbol 5 and understood the connection between the symbol 5 and five counted items; should be encouraged to count things he sees around him and attach each counting with a number value. This way, we are helping the child understand the cardinality of numbers. However, when this same child sees the numeral symbol 5 on a soccer player's shirt, there is a need to help the child understand that this is a symbolic representation. But if the child is at number 5 in the queue, the number 5 here represents an ordinal value. These examples clearly illustrate the importance of learning numbers in the contexts of meaningful, real world interactions and explorations.
If we apply our knowledge of child development in curriculum practices, we will know that children learn best in an active environment where opportunities for interactions and manipulations are available to facilitate their learning. Thus, the math environment should be challenging and rich in objects and materials available for manipulation and exploration of numbers. Manipulative materials provide tactile and visual opportunities for discovering numbers, and offer many open-ended possibilities for helping children think about mathematical ideas. Commercially-produced manipulatives are attractive and easily purchased, available in the form of plastic or rubber counters in a variety of shapes and forms such as fruits, dinosaurs, animals, fish, frogs, teddy bears, transport, etc.
A print rich environment where there is a rich display of mathematical words and numbers support children's understanding of numbers. Literature that teaches relevant mathematical and number concepts like books, rhymes and songs can be used to promote the literacy of numbers in the early years. Favorite and familiar stories like "The Three Little Pigs", "The Three Billy Goat Gruffs", "Ten Black Dots", "How Much Is a Million", 'Eating Fractions" and "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" are some examples of literature that teach numbers and math concepts. Similarly, picture charts of nursery rhymes and songs can be incorporated as an important approach to learning numbers. Some favorite nursery rhymes and songs that teach numbers are "Ten Little Indians", "Six Little Ducks" or "1,2,3,4,5, Once I Caught a Fish Alive", "Five Little Speckled Frogs' and so on.
The natural environment also provides abundant and rich opportunities for helping children make sense of numbers. Natural materials such as stones, pebbles, sand, leaves, flowers, seeds, twigs, sticks, tree barks are freely available for children to explore concepts like counting, one-to-one correspondence, ordinal and cardinal numbers, number sequencing, quantification and value of numbers. Field trips, nature explorations or a walk in the neighbourhood naturally engage children in thinking about numbers; for example, children can be encouraged to count the number of white cars they see on the road, count and compare the number of big and small cars parked at the car park or read the number plates on vehicles.
Play, an important part of childhood offers many enriching opportunities for learning numbers. When children pretend play at grocery or with kitchen utensils, they learn about one-to-one correspondence through table-setting, ordering of kitchen play utensils such as bowls, plates, cups, spoons and forks by sizes or colors, read and identify symbols of numerals when preparing price tags on grocery or food items.
Adults should make use of everyday opportunities through daily interactions with their children to teach and facilitate the construction and understanding of numbers. Integrating everyday tasks and routine activities like snack time, circle time, bath, tooth brushing, and even outdoor explorations provide a natural and spontaneous setting for children to make sense of numbers. Children can be encouraged to count their biscuits, name the shapes of their sandwiches, match number of spoons to bowls in one-to-one correspondence or name the colors and shapes of their utensils, and so on.
The early years math environment should not advocate teaching numbers through meaningless rote and drills. While developmentally appropriate practices always advocate teaching and learning through an exploratory, experimental and discovery approach, some skills and concepts are still more effectively learned and acquired through an adult's direct teaching or through some extent of scaffolding or facilitation; for example, helping children make sense of the conservancy of numbers and number bonding. Whatever the approaches used, the teaching and learning of numbers should always advocate for fun, meaningful interactions, where numbers are introduced in the contexts of the children's personal and real world experiences.
Lastly the people in the environment; parents, family members, teachers and peers, play the most important role in helping children make sense of numbers. Adults should make use of opportunities derived from everyday natural occurrences to introduce numbers. Such attention to creating number awareness would help develop the habits of mind in children to think mathematically as they engage in active exploration and interaction with people and materials in their environment. Developing and nurturing the disposition for mathematical thinking in young children will facilitate a healthy growth towards numeracy development.
