Young children are using stories to understand and practise mathematical concepts. Wendy Scott saw this approach in action at a primary school
Enacting dramatic scenarios can help young children to understand and use complex mathematical concepts.
Stories that engage children help them to grasp the purpose of mathematical activity and to practise their emerging skills, as well as sustaining their motivation.
Trisha Lee, artistic director of the theatre and education company MakeBelieve Arts, is fascinated by how young children learn. While participatory projects director at the London Bubble Theatre Company, developing expressive drama programmes for adults and children, she began developing work that was strongly influenced by Vivian Gussin Paley's way of teaching her kindergarten class at the University of Chicago. This involved encouraging children to tell their own stories, helping by scribing their words, and then enabling the children to act in each others' dramas around a taped-out stage.
Trisha became convinced of the value of this approach and decided she wanted to further develop the use of stories to help children's learning. After leaving the Bubble, she founded MakeBelieve Arts with arts education director Isla Tompsett.
Sense through stories
Vivian Gussin Paley is the company's patron and much of its work is inspired by her theory that children use stories to organise their experience and make sense of what happens to them.
MakeBelieve Arts has devised sessions that introduce drama to the literacy hour and the Peer Group Project, in which primary school-aged children help the school's youngest to document and play out their stories (see box).
When MakeBelieve Arts heard about the work of Kieran Egan at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, they realised its potential for extending their practice. Professor Egan suggests that through the influence of stories that make sense to them, young children can understand and remember detailed procedures and address complex concepts, including the principles of right and wrong.
The approach is not simply about using fictional stories in teaching, nor about how to tell stories more effectively, but how to draw on the power and meaning of story form to engage children in their learning.
Inspired by this way of thinking, MakeBelieve Arts has begun to explore whether dramatic techniques can be used to teach numeracy and to help children develop mathematical concepts.
Problems with a lion
They have been working with children in Key Stage 1 at the John Stainer Community Primary School in Lewisham, London. This school is part of an Excellence in Cities Action Zone called 'Creating Success', which funded the research and development of the work.
Jenni Back, from the national Millennium Maths Project, worked as a consultant to the project. She is interested in the possibilities for enriching mathematical learning and is evaluating the MakeBelieve Arts approach as it develops.
During the five sessions held weekly with the Year 1 class, Trisha and Isla involved the children in a carefully prepared story set on an imaginary island. They ensured that all the children would have an opportunity to participate in enacting events, and invited comments and suggestions from the class throughout the session.
The story involved symbolic images, including a wise old woman, a king whose son travelled the world, and a lion alarming a farmer by devouring his cattle. The need to solve this threatening problem created an urgency that was transmitted to the children.
The story first addressed the farmer's attempts to frighten the lion, with the help of his friends. It raised the issue of number sense, and the ability to recognise instantly the constituent size of a group. The children explored this in pairs, using pebbles to represent people, following the example set in the story. It was made clear to the children that the activity involved guesswork, and it was acceptable not to know something definitely.
The children were able to explain that the familiar pattern of dots on dice made it easier to estimate a number than to gauge the number of pebbles randomly grouped in their partner's palm. This discovery led to further problem solving, linked to the king's determination to call in his army to deal with the lion.
Although convinced that he had the largest army in the world, the king did not know exactly how many soldiers there were. He called in three wise counsellors and asked their advice. Each replied, 'I do not know precisely how many people there are in your army, but I do know there are an awful lot.'
The first counsellor tried tallying individual soldiers, but soon lost count. The second tried linking each soldier to an immovable rock, but found that he ran out of space. All of this was enacted by the class, helped by three Year 6 pupils who attended the session.
The third counsellor then asked each soldier to pick up a pebble and put it in a pile. The children tried out this suggestion too, and were surprised how difficult it was to estimate the number of pebbles in the resulting heap of stones. They agreed that counting the number of pebbles contributed by a great army would present an impossible challenge.
Counting pebbles
Because the children were interested and engaged in the story line, they were able to grasp the solution proposed by the heroic prince.
The class was divided into groups of three, representing the three counsellors, sitting in rows at the tables with a basket in front of each of them.
They all participated in a practice session, where each had ten pebbles, and systematically substituted one for every ten units, and then one for every ten tens in turn. The children were instructed to use an accurate form of words each time that a pebble was used to represent ten others: 'Can you put one pebble in your basket to remind me I have counted one lot of ten?'
Ultimately they reached eight hundreds, six tens and seven units, and checked the number by counting the collection of pebbles held by each counsellor.
Some of the children grasped the concept of representing 867 in this way, and were able to replicate the experiment in their own group, helped by the older pupils, Isla and Trisha. Although this was the first session for the class, and the children were only five or six years old, they showed considerable perseverance as well as skill in the task.
The story was carefully prepared, and much thought was given to the resources and the precise use of language. This, combined with the lively enactment of the main dramatic events, helped many of the children to gain an insight into sophisticated number concepts.
Suggested scenarios
Trisha found the evidence for this insight when she returned to the class three weeks after the final session and asked the children what they remembered of the story and the mathematics they had shared.
The children's favourite moments were those that had involved them in an activity. Playing with the pebbles in pairs, and putting pebbles in the baskets were mentioned, and one child quoted exactly the phrase they had been instructed to use to record the substitution of ten pebbles by one in the next basket.
The class agreed overwhelmingly that they would like more stories from the imaginary island. One suggestion was that they could count in tens or twos or fives. Others suggested even more imaginative scenarios - one child said 'the lion could come again and kill all the armies and we have to count how many in the army die and how many in the army live', while another suggested that 'we could have a story where we collect and count shells'.
There is clearly a strong case for representing mathematical protocols and concepts through stories, which deserves to be followed up in the Foundation Stage.
