Book extract - Falling into line

In Talk for Maths Mastery, we viewed children as inherently mathematical from birth, competent and capable and full of potential, rather than taking a view of the child waiting to be instructed though a narrow set of knowledge presented in a prescribed, linear programme of learning.

This shift in perspective makes the practitioner much more aware of how children are thinking, making their learning visible, including what they bring from home and their ‘funds of knowledge’ drawn from their everyday lives.

Through our observations and the learning stories, we could clearly see children’s innate motivation, curiosity, reasoning and problem solving as they played and talked together. This intrinsic drive to make sense of everything was visible in the youngest of children as they researched how to balance bricks, line up animals in the right order or follow a rhythm beating on a basket.

Gopnik et al., in their in-depth work How Babies Think(1999), talk about children’s ‘drive to understand the world in its purest form’, saying: ‘Human children in the first three years of life are consumed by a desire to explore and experiment.’

Jacob, nine months

At nine months, Jacob is matching the pattern of the drumbeats that Emily is modelling. His learning is embodied through his physical actions as he tunes into the rhythm and sequence of the beat. He starts to say ‘ba, ba, ba’, following Emily’s voice as she says ‘bounce, bounce, bounce’. The beat becomes internalised and builds from a simple tapping to a pattern of beats. Clapping is another embodied way of following a sequence or pattern.

Elsie, two-years-old

Elsie was playing with the wooden bricks. Building towers of different heights, she said, ‘This one is getting really big.’ Her mum talks about them being ‘tall towers’. After lots of playing, building towers and then knocking them down, her brother Henry joins in as a play partner. He shows her how to build the towers (a vertical line) and make a row adding one more brick each time from one to four (horizontal line). Elsie’s thinking is supported and she becomes focused on the number of bricks, counting them and adding a chick in a basket on each one.

Callum and Joey, in Reception

Callum and Joey have been playing with the dough, carefully making footballs and lining them up. ‘We got to line the footballs up ready for the goalie,’ says Callum. ‘Yeah he’s got to get them in the order so he can save them,’ replies Joey. As the play progresses, the boys decide that it would be helpful for the goalie to number each ball. They fetch the wooden numbers but run out at 10. The problem is quickly sorted out as they find paper, scissors and felt pens to make the missing numbers.

Lachi, 4.7 years

Lachi has been involved in sorting and classifying his beloved wild animals, lining them up in compatible groups based on his thinking and chosen criteria:

• Lions, tigers, leopards and cheetahs all positioned facing the same direction.
• Giraffes clustered together.
• Elephants and rhinoceros lined up and facing in the same direction as the big cats.
• Zebras in their own enclosure.
• Sealions in their own enclosure with added sea to swim.
• A stray ostrich (behind the cats but also facing in the same direction) and a kangaroo (with the giraffes).

How interesting it would be to talk to him about his reasoning for these groups. Why are they all facing the same way? Will all the cats get on together – are they all the same? Why is the ostrich next to the lions? We need to wait for the right moment to ask. However, simply saying, ‘How interesting. What is happening with your animals?’ gives Lachi the space to share his thinking in his own way and will probably be a wonderful catalyst for sustained shared thinking through a serve and return conversation.

ABOUT THIS BOOK

How to Recognise and Support Mathematical Mastery in Young Children’s Play: Learning from the ‘Talk for Maths Mastery’ Initiativeby Di Chilvers is published by Routledge, £22.99, www.routledge.com. Save 20 per cent until 30 September with the code ‘MM20’.

This article features excerpts from Chapter 2: ‘Maintaining the momentum of children’s mathematical development.’