Have you ever heard the term emergent mathematics? It is the word used to describe how children construct mathematics from birth and continuing throughout the life of the person through a combination of cognitive development and interaction with their environment. This principle is parallel to the concept of emergent literacy, the standard for teaching children to read and write in early childhood classrooms. Both principles suggest that young children, regardless of age should be exposed and interacted with mathematics and literacy from the day they are born.

Reading to infants, toddlers, and preschoolers is known to forecast early positive literacy because it involve children in language and provides them a chance to interact with it. The same can be said as true for mathematical understanding. As children begin to interact physically, mentally, and socially with their surroundings during the first few months of life, they also start to build the foundations of mathematical concepts.  Just like early readers know that alphabets correspond to spoken sounds, numbers have quantity attached to them as well. This early construct of mathematical concepts is known as “Mathematics Acquisition Device” or MAD, as posited by Sinclair and Kamii (1995), which functions like “language acquisition device”. This permits children to naturally achieve some mathematical concepts even without direct teaching; follow a generally standard sequence of gradual development; and construct mathematical concepts from a very early age. Researchers and teachers, upon carefully scrutinizing infants, toddlers, preschoolers, and children in primary grades, see evidence of all these criteria.

Here is an excerpt from Butterworth (1999) as he shares that if one watches long enough, you will observe that young children displays mathematical thought as follows:

An 18-month-old child playing in a large pit filled with different colored balls drops one ball, then a second ball, and then a third ball over the side of the pit. The child then goes to the opposite side of the pit and drops two balls. He then goes back to the first side, reexamines the grouping of balls, moves to the second side and drops another ball over the side to make a grouping of three.

While the child is not really showing a clear evidence of mathematical relationship as he is showing only visual perception but the display of coordination and comparison shows he is displaying concepts of  “same” or “different”, “more,” “less,” and basic equality. Of course, it is premature for the child to be developmentally ready for number concepts such as counting and quantification, however, this simple task shows that children as young as 18 months are making relationships and exercising their logical thought processes.

Thus, teachers need to understand that this early, children have the ability for mathematical know how. It is important to provide activities to encourage construction of these mathematical concepts as Emergent mathematics continues throughout early childhood. It is helpful to encourage children to construct many varied relationships between and among objects, to interact with others, and to mentally and physically act on the objects around them to promote the concept of building foundations as provided by emergent mathematics.

References:

Briscoe, Ted (2000). “Grammatical Acquisition: Inductive Bias and Coevolution of Language and the Language Acquisition Device”.Language 76 (2): 245–296. 

Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspects_of_the_Theory_of_Syntax on October 2, 2014

Geist, E. (2009). Children are Born Mathematicians: Supporting Mathematical Development, Birth to Age Eight. Merrill, Pearson Education.

Haylock, D. (2010).Mathematics explained for primary teachers. 4thedition.London: SAGE Publications Ltd

 

 

By: Ruel P. Labrador | T – III | Morong Elementary School