“Structured input does not have to be children sitting on the carpet with an adult talking to them or children sitting at a table with worksheets,” states Camilla Gilmore, professor of mathematical cognition at Loughbrough University.
Speaking on the latest episode of the Tes Podagogy podcast (you can listen below), she explains how early years settings and parents can build on a child’s natural understanding of maths to move them to being able to better understand and manipulate number and shape.
It may seem easiest to simply “tell” children how to do this, but from the research we have into early numeracy, she believes that is not going to work.
“Play is so important. Children learn so much through play, but they will not get [everything they need] in a very unstructured play situation,” she says.
“So what they need is some kind of guidance or structured input either through the play situations or alongside them, so we can help children build on intuitive skills they have so they can think of some of the more formal aspects of how we represent number.
Numeracy in EYFS
“But it has to be appropriate to the child’s age and stage of development and it has to be engaging and fun. And you can do a lot of quite structured input through play.
“Structured input can happen outside using stones to represent how many children there are in each group, or whatever it might be. Structured input can be playful for children. This builds on the best about what we know about children’s development but also the big curricula interventions used in the US.”
Do children have a natural sense of number?
In the podcast, Gilmore explains that children arrive in the EYFS with an intuitive sense of number and shape.
“They start with a cognitive set of tools that enable them to see numerical aspects of the world,” she says. “One system they have allows them to see magnitudes and understand representing and comparing magnitudes. They have another tool that allows them to look at small sets of exact items and distinguish them from each other.
“But, of course, this does not give them the symbolic representations, the number words and symbols, we use for counting and representing number. So being able to exactly represent large numbers is something that can’t happen without some input.”
The trouble is, numeracy is not viewed in the same way as literacy. Whereas with literacy we have a cultural expectation of parents reading to their children and clear pathways to becoming literate, numeracy does not have either.
Gilmore says it is unlikely we will ever get a clear pathway to numeracy as we have with literacy - she says it is is just too complex - but on parental expectation she does think we can make progress.
How can parents help children with maths?
“Some of the studies we have done with parents of children who are 3 to 4 years old, many of them know about reading to their children. They have had this message from when the children were born,” she says. “However, very few people have ever said to them, ‘Have you thought about doing number things? Here are some really simple things you can do at meal times or on walks.’ So they have not thought about doing it and they think of maths as something that happens at school, or that their three-year-old is too young for.”
She sets out some assistance we can provide in this area. The podcast also touches on optimal pedagogy in the EYFS for number development, the importance of spatial skills and our ill-fitting assessment approach for maths.
“I think we are trying to make simple judgements but the situation is complex,” she argues. “That is the difficulty - it requires a complex assessment to know where children area. It requires us to look at how they use number across different situations.”
