Meaningful Mathematics

I’ve spent many years observing and researching childrens' role play. I find it fascinating. Role play takes many different forms, but always comes back to children's representation of their lived experiences. For example, pretending to be a baby, a parent or carer, making dinner, going shopping, or being an animal etc.

This type of play provides children with a rich opportunity to make sense of the world, and is therefore often encouraged within early years in the form of a home corner play area. Providing this environment offers children a space to really make sense of their home environment and is something all children will have experienced in some form. It allows children to be engaged to their highest level. So why do we not place the same emphasis and focus when we explore math within the early years?

When it comes to math ,we seem to approach it in a completely different way to the type of learning described above. I have seen endless ‘math areas’ limited to a table for learning, and draws filled with resources such as peg boards, beads, number puzzles etc . While useful to some degree, this type of environment completely lacks the opportunity for rich, meaningful play that would allow children to be fully immersed in math in a purposeful way.

As adults we engage with math everyday. For example we use math to pay for things, pairing items by similarities/size/pattern/shape such as shoes or socks, to organize/weigh/count ingredients when cooking, to set alarms and timers and so on. This is where the rich opportunities lay for children to learn. So, what would happen if these types of real world experiences were used as the framework for math learning within the early years environment?

During my career I reflected on this quite a lot, and in one nursery where I worked I decided to set the math area up as a shop. What transpired was an intrinsic motivation by almost all children to engage in math activities for an extended period of time. From counting money, adding items up, taking sums away when giving change, setting opening and closing times for the shop, weighing fruit and vegetables, exploring shape and space through placement of items and engaging in numerical writing. The opportunities were endless, and all happening simultaneously and without friction. Of course adults could join this play and scaffold the learning, but it often wasn’t needed as the children were motivated to do much of this themselves anyway, which further reinforced and embedded their mathematical knowledge and understanding.

The thought of this experience, and what the children got from it, fills me with joy. There were no peg boards, no plastic shapes, and no worksheets in sight. Nor were there any children complaining about what they were doing. Just children engaging in meaningful learning opportunities that were not separated into boxes.

Offering real life and meaningful opportunities to children is known to motivate them, so why are we not offering this to children when exploring mathematics.