Play allows young children to acquire and practice mathematics skills and concepts while engaging in meaningful and enjoyable activities (Bobis, 2010; Reed & Young, 2018). In particular, open-ended play provides children opportunities to discover materials, explore concepts, and solve problems (Rosli & Lin, 2018) and in the process,…

Young children, especially those from lower-resource communities, often do not have adequate exposure to robust mathematics instruction in preschool. Well-organized and focused early mathematical interventions can help young children develop a foundation of informal mathematics knowledge and lead to greater mathematics knowledge upon entry into…

Young children, especially those from lower-resource communities, often do not have adequate exposure to robust mathematics instruction in preschool. Well-organized and focused early mathematical interventions can help young children develop a foundation of informal mathematics knowledge and lead to greater mathematics knowledge upon entry into…

Socioeconomic attainment gaps in mathematical ability are evident before children begin school, and widen over time. Little is known about why early attainment gaps emerge. Two cross-sectional correlational studies were conducted in 2018-2019 with socioeconomically diverse preschoolers, to explore four factors that might explain why attainment…

Mathematics is abstract for young children. One way to help children develop better understanding of core early mathematical concepts is by providing concrete learning experiences, thereby making mathematics more accessible to them. Additionally, children will choose to spend more time on subjects or activities they enjoy, which in turn leads to…

This article presents examples of how early childhood educators (prek-2nd grade) might use their daily read alouds as a vehicle for increasing mathematical talk and mathematical connections for their students.

Stories live within us and shape our identities. What opportunities do students have to share their stories during the learning of mathematics? How can storytelling enhance the development of mathematical identities? In this article, the author shares reasons for and examples of ways that storytelling in mathematics can support the development of…

Mathematical learning is an integral part of early childhood education (ECE). In Aotearoa New Zealand there is a range of valuable curriculum resources including "Te Kakano," a "living, evolving" framework of purposeful activities, to assist teachers to notice and respond to mathematics learning. This article aims to contribute…

Although it is now more commonly acknowledged that young children can engage with mathematics, it is not as commonly acknowledged that really young children (such as those aged under three years) can engage with and think mathematically. One of the reasons for this is the inability of adults to recognise mathematics in what these young children…

The main objectives of this study were to construct a conceptual model of parent-child math discourse strategies (MDS) and explore (a) the differences between mother's and father's MDS with their children, (b) the relations between parents' MDS and children's responses, and (c) the relations between parent-child MDS and children's math…

In this paper, we offer a theoretical account of the emotion-cognition dialectic (i.e. the unit of feeling and cognition in thought) in identity formation (or identification), focusing on early childhood and mathematics. We consider how contradictory (emotional-cognitive) experiences which arise in different forms of mathematical activity (a…

Our goal in this article is to discuss the importance of problems in early childhood education for the child's development and engagement with the mathematics existing in childhood culture. Our assumption is that an important task for young children's education is to create a democratic and critical environment, in which multiplicity of…

This practical book provides pre- and inservice teachers with an understanding of how math can be learned through play. The author helps teachers to recognize the mathematical learning that occurs during play, to develop strategies for mathematizing that play, and to design formal lessons that make connections between mathematics and play. Common…

This article begins with a theoretical discussion of the characteristics that a task should feature to be regarded as a mathematics problem suitable for pre-primary students. Those considerations are followed by a report of a classroom experience in which three problems involving quotative or partitive division were posed to pre-primary school…

Conversation Analysis uncovers features of talk-in-interaction during "real life" conversations. When these phenomena are repeatedly observed in the data, conclusions can be drawn regarding the function of the phenomena as elements of talk. In this project, we drew on a corpus of video-recordings collected in five different early…