45 woman this month | August 2012 | The first mathematics teacher your child experiences has quite a responsibility. It’s an important or, you could say, ‘critical’ role. Let’s hope they know what they are doing and have the patience, dedication and understanding of some fundamentals to be effective; it is of course you! You will most likely be the teacher with whom they learn for the longest period of time as well. Are you feeling confident? In terms of the most effective educational practices and ways of facilitating mathematical learning, opinions differ between countries, districts, schools on the same street and even between classrooms next door to each other within the same school. There are, however, some ideas on early development that share widespread support. Are you ready for your challenge? Read on. When entering the world, children are surrounded by the use of a highly developed and sophisticated number system that has evolved over thousands of years. Your child has rather less time, though, to get to grips with the early fundamentals of a discipline that not only equips us with vital life skills to communicate, save lives, function, research and evolve in a vast number of areas. Children see, experience and are aware of ‘numbers’ very early in life: on birthday cards, clocks, on television, in shops and on signs. These though are not strictly ‘numbers’ but are squiggles (to children) or symbols that we use to represent quantities. Part of our role is to attach this meaning as quantities to these symbols through life experiences. The early experiences we provide for our children establish the relationships between quantities, associated language and symbols. They also allow us to explore the relationships between different quantities. To set a context for the importance of these early experiences, we will consider one of the foremost educational theories, which is reflected in our high quality contemporary classrooms. This is the theory of constructivism which has many variants, but essentially embraces the idea that how children learn and the impact of how they internalise their experiences is based on already embedded ideas and experiences. What this means for you as parents, and teachers, is that you cannot expect all children to learn in the same way and at the same rate. You cannot expect children to readily embrace what they are not yet cognitively ready for. Appropriate early experiences are critical for preparing the construction ground that schools will help you build upon. The big message is to provide early experiences through interacting with your child whilst playing, shopping, singing, cooking, arts and craft activities, going up and down stairs. Try to exploit the opportunities that present themselves on a day-to-day basis in order to support your child’s development and understanding. These experiences develop relating numerals to amounts, counting items and explaining ideas of ‘more’ and ‘less’. It’s also useful to play with addition and subtraction, as well as talking through the language and experience as it relates to addition and subtraction.
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