Introduction to Early Childhood Maths
Early Years Curriculum Guidelines (2006) state that there are few areas or skills that children are to develop during their learning:
Social learning – develops understanding on diversity
such as culture and identity
Personal learning – develops independence and
enhancing personal development
Oral language – develops speaking and listening skills
to show understanding on mathematical terms
Thinking – stimulates children’s minds to relate
and reason out mathematical terms with
their surroundings
Kribes-Zaleta and Bradshaw (2003) highlight the importance of play as children make mathematical discoveries on their own. For example, when children are given car toys with same shape and different colours, they can carry out sorting activity. First, I will trigger their thinking by asking them about the similarity and difference of the car toys, which are the shape and the colour. To carry out sorting activity, they will have to sort the car toys according to their same attribute possessed by the objects, which is colour. This activity helps to develop children’s personal learning, social learning, oral skills and as well as thinking. This is so because they create their own understanding of mathematical concepts and they get to relate the toys with real life context. Other than that, they will explain how they sort the toys by prompting them with relevant questions and by doing this, they will be able to reason out the connection of attributes in sorting activity. Apart from that, I can use other activities that are related to sorting such as sorting animal toys by number of legs or sorting number of wheels of vehicles.
I personally feel that Mathematics is a very unique subject to be studied and learnt in life. We never realised that everything around us I made up of mathematical concepts, such as designs and shapes of buildings and bridges. I never realised that I actually acquired mathematical understanding since I was young and that it had been developed when I entered school. In my opinion, mathematics learning is very flexible, in which it depends on the teachers themselves how to teach the children about mathematical concepts and what kinds of activities that we can utilise in our classrooms.
Furthermore, I agree with Kribes-Zaleta and Bradshaw (2003) on the build of mathematical concepts in children since childhood years. It is indeed important for teachers to nurture the children with appropriate activities so that the children able to make connections of the concepts with the real world such as everything we see is made up of shapes. Also, children learn mathematics in lots of different ways and one of them is through finger counting. Teachers should be able to manipulate children’s own parts of body to help them understand about numbers and counting and not just relying on other objects like sticks.
In conclusion, children develop their mathematical concepts since they are young and thus I, as a teacher, play a vital role in providing essential learning to enhance and broaden the children’s knowledge about those concepts.
