Children are naturally curious. They want to solve problem for themselves.
Seeing children as mathematically capable and providing opportunities for them to explore,
experiment and investigate will enhance this innate drive and help develop their reasoning skills.
As a practitioner, you should foster children’s curiosity and encourage a
positive can-do approach to mathematics. You can do this by offering inspiring resources, observing play,
responding to children with skilful discussion and thoughtful questioning.
It’s really important to celebrate children’s creativity and their attempts to find a solution.
One of the elements of reasoning is really thinking about trajectories,
thinking about pathways and directions. When you’re playing alongside the
children that you’re introducing them to things like curves and angles and
perhaps when you’re out in the local community going on walks,
you’re following a direction you’re going along a certain pathway.
And those things I think really help to give children a mental image in their
head about direction, about pathways, about a beginning, an end, getting from A to B.
I think the forest comes to mind. Often with the younger ones,
when we arrive at the forest a child will have taken the lead and I’ll pinpoint that
child and say, “Right, which way are we going to go next then?”
and I’ll let them choose the path for the group.
And then, often once we’ve stopped and we’ll have our snack and it’s time to go back to the bus,
I’ll often say to the children, “Right, who knows which way we need to go?
Who knows which way the bus is?” and it’s amazing how often they actually
have really taken notice of their direction and which way they came
from and they know which way we need to go back to get to the bus again.
I think it’s really good for the adults to keep in mind the mathematics because
sometimes we can think of the literacy or other areas of the curriculum before
the maths, maybe because we feel a bit nervous about the maths ourselves.
In terms of children communicating to us what their mathematical thinking is,
I think it’s really important to acknowledge that for some children one
of the ways they do that is by making mathematical marks, by doing jottings,
by using some graphics, by making representations.
When children are, they may have made a mark and it could be that was three for
something and it doesn’t look like a numeral for three but obviously we’re
taking account of children’s progressions. So, you’re wanting to
encourage them to continue writing things. So, you wouldn’t be going,
“That’s not what a three looks like.” you’d be praising the effort that’s gone
in and wanting to encourage that and then be modelling writing as well and
model using mathematical notation yourself. And quite often children will be
really busily making marks and maybe again our role as practitioners we often
sort of jump to thinking those are literacy-based marks, when actually a
lot of them have mathematical meaning for children.
It’s again about making sure those resources are there.
So, in each area there are opportunities for them to record their thinking if they want to.
And it’s that each thing that you’ve set up in the room has got a clipboard with it as well,
or a whiteboard or something so that something is there for them to be able
to record if that’s the way they want to do it.
By having genuine conversations, listening carefully and observing children closely,
I believe that practitioners will have greater insight into their children’s
mathematical understanding.
These insights can provide starting points for planned adult-lead time.
I think that when children develop their skills in reasoning, it can support them
to become inquisitive and keen to learn. They become brave enough to try things
out and follow their own lines of enquiry.
In my experience, drawing out mathematics from spontaneous play,
will support children to make links in their mathematical thinking,
engaging children in aspects of real life will give them the opportunity to solve
problems in context, giving them a sense of pride and ownership over their learning.