Number in Early Childhood

Abstract

Recent research has pointed to the need to reconsider our view of how youn children children learn about number, by reviewing the importance of activities such as sorting, ordering and matching and raising our expectations of what young children can do. Initial work by the group has focused on how children learn and appropriate ways of building on this within the holistic ethos of the early years curriculum. This has included looking at contexts in which numbers occur incidentally, and on developing appropriate ways of challenging children to solve problems, including encouraging children's informal representations of number. Children's interest in large numbers and time has been apparent, and the theme of children's meanings for numbers has emerged.

This paper contextualises the research and reviews its progress:the paper by Pauline Wilson which follows this one is a case study arising out of the ongoing work.