Mathematical Thinking in Kindergarten
Mathematical Thinking Let me start with a series of engagements from my Kindergarten class in the past week as we explored the process of representation using the context of number. We started with a read aloud of One is a Snail, Ten is a Crab by April Pulley Sayre and Jeff Sayre. The book uses animals' feet (and their combinations) to represent different numbers. The children were then invited to choose their own representations of 1 and 10 initially, and then other numbers. Although all children used a range of representations, they all showed 10 as a collection of ten of whatever they had chosen to represent 1. The next day, to help the children think mathematically about efficiency in representations, we used the Smartboard to represent numbers in two teams - the "individual squares" team and the "crabs" team. On rotation, one member of each team raced each another to represent numbers such as 60. The children had opportunities to communicate what they n...