Mathematical Teaching Moments: Between Instruction and Construction.

The purpose of this Swedish study is to highlight how a preschool teacher has developed preschool children’s mathematical curiosity through play in a preschool. Play is viewed as the foundation for children’s learning, because play can spark the child’s curiosity towards knowledge while at the same time entertaining the child. The aim of this study is to show how this can be done in practice.

The study shows that the teacher, through respectful listening, including careful observation of the children’s actions, succeeded at asking questions that sparked the children’s mathematical curiosity. Furthermore, these questions developed the activity and resulted in a learning environment where several mathematical principles were utilised.

The results therefore show that the context of activity supports the children’s involvement, however it also sets limits to how far the teacher can go without jeopardising the activity and consequently losing the interest of the children.

The study was conducted in a private preschool in a large town in southern Sweden. Several groups of children were recorded on video over several days. The study focuses on a situation where ‘guided play’ evolves into learning of mathematics. Situations with ‘guided play’ have been analysed based on different theoretical concepts to prove how the situation actually develops into learning of mathematical principals, even if learning was not the immediate purpose of the game. The particular situation involves three children and one preschool teacher. The children were given several glass jars to play with. Initially, the game consisted of gluing coloured paper onto the jars to use them as tea light candle holders. The activity, however, developed into a dialogue between the teacher and children about the shapes and sizes of the jars, and each child sorted the jars according to shape and size. Similarly, the exact number of jars and the number of jars divided between the three children were discussed. Several mathematical principles thus came into play unintentionally.

Lange, T., Meaney, T. Riesbeck, E. & Wernberg, A. (2014). “Mathematical Teaching Moments: Between Instruction and Construction”. I: U. Kortenkamp et al. (red.): Early mathematics learning. Selected Papers of POEM 2012 Conference. Springer Science. 37-54.