Challenge + children’s interests + play

Cutler, Gilkerson, Parrott and Browne (2003) highlight the importance of establishing rich and meaningful environments that allow children to explore mathematical concepts through play. I believe that meaningful environments for children must take into account their interests as it encourages them to engage in learning activities and persist through difficulties they may encounter, and persisting through difficulties is usually how anyone learns anything. Furthermore, Perry & Dockett (2002) lists “not knowing” and “wanting to know” (p.98) as two conditions that tends to exist simultaneously, which motivate humans to learn. I believe the idea of a challenge connotes children not knowing something, while the notion of children’s interests motivates children to develop a wanting to know.

So how can teachers facilitate challenge? Firstly by believing that children are capable learners and can rise up to challenges (Perry & Dockett, 2002) and secondly, by knowing the developmental sequence of mathematical concepts (Cutler, Gilkerson, Parrott & Browne, 2003). For example, if a teacher knows that counting all as an addition strategy tends to occur and generally needs to be understood before moving onto the more difficult strategy of counting-on (NSW Department of Education and Training, 2005), we know to challenge children who understand how to perform addition using counting-all strategy to try the counting-on strategy in order to improve efficiency and deepen mathematical understanding.

What about facilitating children’s interests? In a way, by providing play situations, children’s interests emerge. In early childhood meaningful environments for learning are created through teachers first paying attention to the subject of children’s curiosity through observing children’s thinking and questioning, then drawing out mathematical understandings relevant to those interests (Perry & Dockett, 2002). I believe this can become more difficult as the mathematical concepts become more complicated, but nevertheless it is not a reason for teachers to resort to boring worksheets. According to Waite-Stupiansky and Stupiansky (1999), playing maths-games can “take the drudgery out of practicing [and learning] math and add the challenge of thinking more efficiently”, improve students’ mathematical abilities and increase their excitement with regards to learning maths.